


The Break and the Mend

by Jillypups



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Benjeera, F/M, FUCK SORRY I FORGOT, Fluff, I don't even know what to tag anymore, I'm basically just shipper trash, Jon is KitN, Love, Post-Canon, Rickon is informal King of Skagos, Romance, SO, Sam is DJ Jazzy Maester, So Jojenpaste is a thing here, all this sort of shit that is right up my jillypup alley, give them a chance pretty please, oh god okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-08
Updated: 2016-01-21
Packaged: 2018-05-12 12:27:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 27,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5666044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jillypups/pseuds/Jillypups
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Benjen Stark spent years beyond the Wall, having been ambushed numerous times by the white walkers. He finally gave up and retreated high up in the Frostfangs, masquerading as a wildling, his loyalty to the Night's Watch never wavering. </p><p>Meera Reed spent a year imprisoned beneath the weirwood, almost as long wandering aimlessly in a land she did not know. She was determined to get home, despite the fact that each passing day stole hope that she would ever get there. </p><p>And then their paths met.</p><p>EDIT: OH SHIT I FORGOT SORRY, this is the same universe as the Jon/Sansa fic I wrote "All the Pretty, Pretty, Pieces." MY BAD</p><p>ARGH also forgot I aged everyone up AND some time has passed. Here are the ages as I figured: Rickon is about 16 or 17, Shireen is 22, Sansa is 24, Jon is 27, Meera is 28/29, Benjen is 42/43. </p><p>  <a href="http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/136850021088/the-break-and-the-mend-chapter-1-benjen-stark">Crappy picset sorry</a></p><p> </p><p>Gifted to my Benjeera bbs, Michael and Janel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [michael1280](https://archiveofourown.org/users/michael1280/gifts), [janelrenee](https://archiveofourown.org/users/janelrenee/gifts).



The falling snow has all but obliterated the surrounding landscape from his sight, and it clings to his brows and his lashes, has long since stung his face to numbness. The galloping pace he has set has jarred his bones and his arse to numbness as well. He feels little and sees less though he knows to hold tight to her, knows to keep his squinting eyes trained on the road.

“My horse,” she murmurs against his neck, her head bobbing up for a moment before it falls back to his shoulder, here where she sits astride his thighs and facing him as a lover would, not that he’s had many of those. But it is the only way to keep her from falling, and he knows this from woeful, recent experience.

“Tethered to mine and following us,” he says truthfully, “just as I said. We switched mounts this morning to give her a rest,” he says, adjusting the cinch of his arm around her. His gloved fingers find the grooves between her ribs, splay to span her back.   _She weighs so little,_  he thinks with a frown, trying to remember the last full meal she ate.

It was a relatively luxurious meal of rabbit meat and wild onions, mushrooms and an unsalted broth, back when she was still well enough to laugh with him and sit her horse, back when her green eyes were still kindling-bright. _That was, what? Five days ago?_ It is difficult to remember. He is not so well himself, but has willed himself to hold fast, has steeled himself with her to fight through it.

“Ben?” she says, her fingers clutching at him here beneath the cloak he has wrapped around them both. The silence of the snowfall and the lack of wind are the only reasons he can hear her little dormouse voice, weak as it is, thin like chimney smoke.

“I’m here,” he says, inclining his head towards her, unable to help himself, because where would he go, without her? His nose is in the dark of her hair. She smells like snow.

“I’m so cold,” she whispers, and briefly he closes his eyes against his own fear.  _Live. Live. Do not give in. Keep breathing._

“I know,” he says with a sigh, and he pulls her closer, willing his body to provide more heat. “We are close, and once there we will warm you up. Just stay with me.”

“We are to the Neck already? But it’s- there is still- it’s still so, oh,” she says, trailing off to mumbling nonsense, and Benjen can discern little save for words like  _snow_  and  _so cold._

“We ride for Winterfell. Their maester will make you well again, I swear it. And then I shall take you home, just as I swore.”

“Not Winterfell,” she says, stiffening against his chest, fingers a scrabble as she moves her arms that are tucked between them like folded bird’s wings. “Please, by the gods, not there,” she says, winding her arms around his body and clutching desperately at him beneath cloaks and furs. She clings to him, snagged on his body like a scrap of cloth stuck to a branch in a storm. If they were as intimate as lovers before, now it could border on the obscene, if either of them were in any shape for such activity.

“Why ever not? It- ah,” he says, shaking his head, wondering how to tell her.

There was never a safe moment, when they were in the savage wildling encampment, to pull the desperate woman aside and tell her who he truly was. All she knew was he was as the others were, ruthless and shrewd, uncaring until she swore she was highborn and could pay a high sum to be returned home. He will not take her coin, in the end, but it was as good an excuse as any to brave the Others, and she proved to be his good luck charm. They did not cross paths with so much as a wight, let alone an Other.

“My lady, I did not- you know me as Ben, as a wildling in clothes from The Watch,” he says, wondering how much of this she will understand in the haze of her fever. “But in truth I am Benjen Stark of the Night’s Watch, son of Rickard Stark of Winterfell, and they will see me through those gates. You need not worry,” he says, slowing their steed to a canter and eventually a trot. It is getting harder to maintain such a fast gait, for both beast and man.  _And for woman._

“No,” she moans. “Sacked by the sea, burned and flayed,” she says against his neck, burrowing past fur and leather and the hem of tunic to find his bare flesh, and her words make his blood run cold just as her shallow breath on his skin pebbles his skin. “It was, Ben,” she whispers.

Benjen now slows the horse to a walk, listens to the whicker and whuffle as the horse catches his breath, head dropping low. He thinks of the things she has said in her sickness, things like a walking as a wolf, things like a boy turned to a tree, how the children of the forest sacrificed her brother. Wild statements born of fever-dreams, things she would _never_ say to him if she we were well. 

“Shhh,” he says after a few moments, dropping the reins a moment to cradle the back of her head with his now-free hand, though the change in position makes his side flare with pain. “You’ll be fine. I am a Stark, my lady, and I will bear you safe passage to, and through, Winterfell. On my name as a Stark. As a man of the—”

“You’re a Stark,” she says, all feeble breathe and faint gust of words.

“Yes,” he says. “We shall eat bread and salt, my lady, we shall get you medicinal herbs and milk of the poppy,” he says to this slip of a woman, this highborn crannogwoman of The Neck, this green eyed creature who shows spirit even when she is ill, shows tooth and bite and humor even with men she does not trust. “My brother’s wife and my nephews will host us, I swear it.”

His companion sobs, a broken thing, cracked and dry.

“It was taken, I swear it. I saw it, I was- I was there,” she says.

“Shhh, save your strength, now,” he says. “I can see the tops of Winterfell. Like the tops of small fine cakes you’ll soon be feasting on,” he says, trying for blithe, trying for light. She exhales through her nose, and he takes that for a laugh.

“You’re a Stark? For true?” she says, voice fading now, and he knows that soon she will be asleep, or unconscious, once again.

“Yes, Jo, I am,” he says.

“I always liked you Starks,” she says, making him chuckle, and before he fully comprehends his own inclination Benjen lands a kiss on her cold brow, and when he hears her lamb’s wool sigh he smiles sadly.

 

“You’ve a raven, Jon,” Sam says, cheeks red and huffing from the long walk from rookery all the way up to the main solar, his maester’s chain winking in the muted light of an overcast, winter afternoon.

Jon pushes away the papers he was studying and sits back in his chair with a yawn and a stretch. “Just as well. I have been boring myself to near tears and inevitable sleep with these things. Go on then, distract me.”

“From Skagos, and of course the wicked thing bit me,” he says, handing over a scroll of parchment with hastily bandaged fingers.

“Rickon’s second familiar, by the sound of it,” Jon says with a snort as he pulls taut the scroll and reads.

_Littel lord and his ladie haf gon. Ride to Winterfell for yor feest to plege loyilty and to drink yor ale. – Osha_

“Unbelievable,” Jon murmurs with a half-smile.

“What is?”

“It would appear that Shireen taught Osha to read and write. She must have finally given up on Rickon,” Jon says, chuckling as he hands Sam the missive so he himself can read it. “I expect they’ll be here soon then. If they asked her to send that the day they left, I wager she sent it a week later for mischief’s sake.” He has only met Osha once, but it was a first impression that will last him his whole life.

“So they _are_ coming for Eddard’s name day feast? How surprising. I’ll have Gilly tidy up a spare chamber, then.”

“Aye, they are. I’m sure it was Shireen’s insistence that pried my wild good-brother from his craggy cliffs. Ask Gilly to air out my lady aunt’s old chambers; they’re warmest and Shireen will likely appreciate the comfort after so much time on Skagos.”

“Your Grace, if I may,” his steward says from the open doorway.

“You may,” Jon says as he turns in his chair, an arm hanging over the back of it as he regards Satin. His steward is all focused frown and contemplation, and it piques Jon’s curiosity.

 “A rider approaches with a horse in tow. He is ragged and desperate and looks like he carries another passenger, a child most like, invalid or dead. But he- But our scouts say he wears  _black_ ,” Satin says, his shoulder pressed against the door frame as he bites a fingernail.

“It does me no good, to worry about how a man dresses,” Jon says with a wave of dismissal, and he is halfway turned back to his correspondence when Satin speaks again.

“Not just black, Your Grace.  _The_  black. The black of the Night’s Watch.”

Jon goes still staring at the dark eyed, earnest face of his steward, remembers cold steel blades and hot licks of a woman’s sorcery. He shakes his head like there is an echo ringing around in it.

“Harwin says- he  _thinks_ , I should say, that there is one ranger who has been gone long enough to still wear the black, Your Grace. One ranger who has been beyond the Wall this entire time,” Satin says.

“No,” Jon says, standing before he even realizes it.

“Yes,” Satin say with a firm nod. “Harwin is out by the North gate now and he says it could be him.”

“Impossible,” Jon murmurs despite the very real and painful way his heart thuds with hope, and he quickly crosses the room to where his cloak and fur hang beside the lit fireplace.

“Dragons fly the skies and good men and bad come back from the dead,” Sam says quietly now that his breath is caught, and he follows Satin and Jon into the hall as the latter man shrugs into his heavy layers. Firelight from wall-mounted sconces flicker like faded memories rekindled to brightness. “Is there really such thing as impossibility, anymore?”

“Apparently not,” Jon says, hands shaking as he clasps together his cloak with the direwolf pin Sansa had made for him.  _More wolf than dragon, Jon, and don’t you forget it,_ he recalls as he ponders a reunion with another pack member. “Go fetch me my queen and let her know. Open the gates and stoke the braziers in the hall, and get the maids in the kitchen to bring out salt and bread and meat besides,” Jon says as they both trot down the stone stairs, glancing back before Satin veers off towards the bedchamber he and Sansa share. “It is probably just a stranger. Regardless, we will open our gates whether it is my uncle or not,” he says.

“I pray it’s him,” Sansa says by his side later on, their hands clasped and fingers laced together like their thoughts so often are.

“Aye, as do I,” Jon murmurs, squeezing her hand.

They stand together with a small number of guard behind and around them, motionless and side by side like carved sculpture, here in the mostly undisturbed snow of the small yard just behind the North Gate, here where foot traffic is so scarce there’s hardly any mud, and the ground is as smooth and sweeping soft as his lady wife’s dove grey cloak. Nervous and excited and wary and afraid, Jon shifts from foot to foot, just once, but it’s enough to capture her attention.

“You dance as your boy does, husband,” she says, eager for distraction, the evenness of her tone replaced with lilt and flirt, despite the shaking of her own limbs.

“And where  _is_  our son? He should be here to meet his great uncle, if it is truly him,” Jon says, glancing sidelong before he turns his head in full to gaze at his wife.  _She is so lovely,_  he thinks, and so he stares, determined to steal away a little of her strength and grace.

“He is still sleeping in our bed, splayed out like a sea star,” she replies lightly, stepping ever so slightly closer to him. She used to sigh over her songs and her stories, but these days it’s the merest mention of their son that tugs so deliciously on Sansa’s heartstrings. Jon releases her hand to sling his arm around her shoulders, to draw her close enough to press a kiss to her temple.

“He sleeps like you, then,” Jon whispers against the baby-fine auburn of her hairline.

“Oh shush, you,” she huffs, squirming ever so against him, but they are both giddy from excitement, both shivery from nerves, and so he lets it spill out against her here. Despite the presence of their guard, she allows it when he drops his head to leave a trail of kisses down her throat. “Jon, it could truly be him,” she breathes when he opens his mouth to lick her, face buried against the fine gauze of the shawl she wears beneath her cloak.

“I know,” he says. “I’ve been waiting for him for so long.”

“That’ll be Dayne up on the wall,” one of their guards says behind him, though Jon hardly hears him. His ears are buzzing; they have been since Satin came in with his news.

“Wait no longer, Jon, look. Listen,” she says, taking light hold of his head with her two hands, her fingers closing in his hair as she gently lifts him up and away from her.

There are shouts of greeting from above and beyond them, sounds of stone and iron grating as the huge gate is drawn open, inch by inch at first but then foot by foot, and once it’s half open Jon can hear the regular beat of horse hooves coming up the rare-worn path.

“Mother’s Mercy, it’s— _oh_ ,” Sansa says, her hand flying to her mouth when the rider in black comes trotting into the small yard.

“Benjen,” Jon says just as Sansa bursts into tears, and he is very nearly there himself; it has been literal years since everything fell apart and came back together, since the man he knew as father was killed and Robb and Cat soon after, since Bran disappeared. The chance to rediscover family even after so long is something truly wondrous.  _An impossibility that is no longer impossible._

Because Benjen is here, gaunt even under so many layers of wool and fur and leather, the same man who went out ranging and never came back, the same man who inspired him to join the Night’s Watch, the same man in face but different, somehow, in the pale of his blue eyes.

“Catelyn? Ned? Ned, is that—you were off to Kings Landing, last I saw,” Benjen says, and his voice is gruff, low, scratched and spread thin, and while Sansa is far better with this sort of thing, Jon swears he can hear the rattle of illness there too.

“No, uncle, it’s not- I’m not- gods, Jon, he doesn’t  _know_ ,” Sansa whispers, voice a falter, fingers a tremble as they slowly lower from her face and she turns from the marvel and wonder of the sight of their uncle to stare at him with anguish.

“He will soon enough,” he whispers to her before stepping forward. “It’s not Ned, uncle, it’s me, Jon,” he says as his guard seems to remember its collective self and two men rush to take control of the head of Benjen’s steed and to tend to the horse tethered to the reins.

“ _Jon_? But you were a man of the Night’s Watch,” Benjen says distractedly as he looks down, and that’s when Jon remembers the word that he did not ride alone. “My lady, we’re here. Come now,” he murmurs, hefting what is apparently a woman further up into his arms before he swings a leg over the neck of his horse and drops down to the ground.

“What on- what in- seven  _hells_ ,” Sansa whispers, sounding more like her sister than herself when the faded black cloak falls away, revealing a waiflike figure clinging to Benjen, her legs loosely wrapped around his hips, her arms draped over his shoulders. It is beyond familiarity, and even Jon clears his throat and looks at the ground. His thoughts spin and blur, a flurry of questions like the flakes that fall lazily from the sky.

“She’s addled from fever and chilled to the bone,” Benjen says to no one in particular, bracing his arms beneath the weight of his unexpected passenger, who squirms once before falling limp once more.

“We can fetch her a warm bath, then, and I can see to her myself,” Sansa says hastily, collecting herself now that there is something to do, now that there is so clearly someone to whom to tend.

“That will take too long, Cat,” Benjen says, striding away from them, and if Jon ever worried how Ned would think of him here as King in the North, the dismissive way his uncle walks away from him adds to that concern.

“I’m not- I am  _Sansa_ , uncle,” she calls out to his retreating figure. “Sansa, your niece,” she says with another waver. “Damn it, Jon, he did not know me,” Sansa cries, tears a slip down her pale cheeks.

“He has other things on his mind, my love,” Jon says as she steps into him and buries her face against his chest, his arms coming up to hold her, just as Benjen held that woman.  _His woman? His prize? His bride?_

Other things, indeed.

 

“Come on, now, Jo,” he says, walking through the godswood, disliking how hard it’s become to carry her. She is so slight that the difficulty can only be a consequence of his own health and capability.  _At least I got us here,_  he thinks as he strides towards the hot springs.  _At least she’s still with me._

“No,” she mumbles, her drooping arms pulling some strength into themselves as they tighten around his neck. “I’m not Jo.”

“Whoever you are, then, my lady,” he says with a grunt as he staggers and drops to his knees beside the pool of steaming water he remembers from his boyhood. The snow cover is thinner here, and leaves and twigs crunch beneath him more than snow and ice.  “Whoever you are, let’s get you warm now, hmm?”

She is practically boneless when he drops to his hands and knees to set her down on the ground, her legs and arms dropping away from him once her back is flat on the earth.  He gazes down at her where she lolls near lifeless on the warm, poolside earth. It’s the first good look he’s had of her since they started south of the Wall. The soft skin beneath her eyes is the color of a bruise, and he uses his teeth to remove one of his gloves, lowers that bare hand to brush a thumb across one of her cheekbones. He has spoken of her fever but she is cold as abandoned bone, even to his chilled fingers.  _Damn it all if she slips away from me now._

“Up we go,” he says, rising to sit back on his haunches. Benjen’s entire body aches from the fast pace of the journey, from the difficulty of holding her while riding, and he suppresses a groan as he shrugs out of his cloak and furs and finally his shirt and undervest. The fire of pain streaks laterally on his right side. His feet are bruised and blistered when he removes his boots. “Now you,” he says to her, or maybe to himself, because he is utterly unsure as to how to go about it.

He settles for removing the thick coat of piecemeal skins and furs she wears and the long, narrow tunic she has beneath it, but he stops entirely at the bandage-like binding across her chest. Benjen winces. She is bruised from their journey, reed thin from sickness, pale as the lilies he has only ever seen once. She moans and shivers when he’s got her down to her breeches, and once her battered feet are bared, he scoops her up and against his chest like she’s a sleeping babe being carried to bed.

“Almost there,” he says, grunting with the effort of getting to his feet. He wonders if he will faint like some highborn maid from his own physical depletion, but that reminds him that the woman in his arms is highborn, and she is anything but prone to weakness. The thought makes him grit his teeth and get on with it.

It’s luxuriously hot when he wades into the water, warmth seeping through his breeches, enveloping him in steam and heat and comfort as he sinks down to his knees and then his arse. Jo sucks in a gasp and opens her eyes at last once he has her fully submerged, and when she blinks and shifts her wide-eyed, glassy gaze from the sky to him, Benjen smiles.

“There she is,” he murmurs, ridiculously proud of himself that she’s woken up, as if it’s because of him instead of the fortifying hot water they’re almost completely submerged in. “There you are, whoever you are.”

“Meera,” she says, making him blink with confusion, and now she’s smiling too.

“Hmm?” He shifts her buoyed weight in his arms so she’s more or less sitting on his thighs, lifts a hand to push her hair away from her eyes. Something arcs in him when she turns her face into the touch, when her eyes close and she sighs with relief.

“I’m not Jo. I’m Meera Reed, and you’ve made me so  _warm_ , Ben,” she whispers, head lolling back against his naked bicep. “Benjen,” she self-corrects with another sigh. “Finally, so warm.”

“Yes, that’s it, Meera,” he says, sampling the taste of this new name with his tongue. With a heaving sigh himself he leans back against the steep bank of the pool, the earth a soft spring of turf against his sore back. “You’re all right, now,” he says, and with that assurance, Benjen sleeps at last.


	2. The start.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/136887440518/the-break-and-the-mend-chapter-2)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So just a head's up, all the even chapters will be flashbacks, and since they're all quite short, I will be posting them a day after the preceding chapter. IF THAT MAKES SENSE?

Meera had stopped running days ago, but her ever-increasing ability to hide from the dead and living alike was only part of the reason she no longer sprinted through the steep snowfall and sparse copses of hearty northern pines. Simply put, she was too tired, too devastated, too broken to do much  more than plod forward, her spear held ever at the ready in case a hare darted across her path, or worse. She had spent nearly a year beneath the weirwood and had been wandering at least as long, surviving each night by the skin of her teeth, and the solitude and snow and ever-present danger were beginning to take their toll. It was why she was caught utterly unawares by the approaching small party of wildling men swathed in white fox fur and tanned skins. Only one wore a standout color, the black worn by men of the Night’s Watch, so faded it blended in with the mud colored hide of his horse; she hadn’t seen a brother in black since the heavyset man down by the Wall.

“Stop, you,” he said, voice carrying well enough without a need to shout.

Meera hesitated, nervously patting down her wrapped chest to make sure it was flat as could be. With her hair tied back and breasts bound she could pass for a boy or young man at a distance, but that safety was quickly dwindling with each step the wildlings took towards her.

“You crazy bastard, what are you on about, wandering out here alone? Your mother should have beaten some sense into you, boy,” the man at the head of the party said as he aimed his horse’s head towards her as he dug in his heels.

“Hold off, Borus, that’s no boy, is it now? That there’s a girl,” said Borus’s rat-faced companion, one eye bulging slightly bigger than the other as he leered in Meera’s direction.

The party of six men circled around her, five of them eager and interested while the man dressed in midnight simply regarded her with a frown of scrutiny. Meera did her best to glare at them all, crossing her arms over her chest, her spear held tightly in her right hand, its pronged metal tip aimed at the rat-faced man’s horse. But her belly churned with nerves, with such a roil she wondered if she would be sick right here in the snow at their horses’ hooves.

“I could go for a girl,” another man said, voice thick like gravel in gruel. “Been a while since I had one.”

“That’s because Meggen stopped touching you in your own tent, Wilfor,” the man dressed in black said. “This woman would sooner bite your prick off than kiss it, I wager,” he said, resting a forearm on his thigh as he gazed down at Meera.

“There’s no truer statement this side of the Wall, you be rest assured,” she said with a snap, aiming her words at the man named Wilfor though she gazed right back up at the man in the black cloak. He exhaled through his nose and glanced at Wilfor with a nod, as if to say _Well there you go._

He had a face that was at once familiar and strange, at once open and guarded, but for some unknown reason was completely trustworthy to her. Perhaps it was the clothes he wore, though he more than likely stole them from a corpse. Perhaps it was because he was the only one not looking at her like she was a leg of mutton to be stolen and devoured. Perhaps it was because she was utterly _alone_ here, and his reserve and calm was a comfort. Either which way, when they heard the distant snapping of branches that made three of the men wheel their horses and flee, when the dark-cloaked man extended his hand and offered her a ride back to their camp, Meera accepted without a second thought. Well, without a third thought, maybe.

He bid her use his foot as a sort of step and pulled her up awkwardly so she could sit behind him on his horse, nothing but a thick pad of blankets between them and beast, and once she assured him she was settled, he turned his horse to follow the others. Meera held her spear on her lap between them, an unspoken boundary and warning. They rode for some time in silence though he never pulled quite flush with the others in his group. If it was because he was sick of their japes and lewd comments, Meera more than understood, and she was grateful for the separation no matter his reasoning.

“Go on, then, what’s your name?” he asked after a while, turning his head to the side to glance at her. He was sharp featured and thin with hair dark enough to match his clothes and long enough to blow in her face whenever the wind changed direction.

“I’m- My name is Jo,” she said after a stammer, thinking of her brother and wishing he were still here. She wished he could tell her the outcome of this meeting, wished he were here to give her some pearl of wisdom plucked from the fathomless sea of his dreams. She did not, however, need greenseer abilities to know it was better to keep her real name a secret.

“I’m Ben,” he said with a downward nod towards his shoulder before looking straight ahead again. “Now, if I were you, I would tell these bloody bastards that you killed the last man who stole you.”

“How do you know I didn’t?” she replied instantly, all edge and crackle. The man named Ben huffed.

“I don’t, which is why I’d appreciate you keeping that spear where it lies, if it’s all the same to you.”

 She dipped her head and smiled. _I am Jo now,_ she thought as she gazed out at the landscape. It was nothing but white snow, black tree bark, and the deep evergreen of pine, but at that moment it seemed prettier than it had before _. I am no longer Meera, but at least I’m not alone, anymore._


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/137039799308/the-break-and-the-mend-chapter-3-did-i-tell)

She dreams of sinking and swimming, of floating like a sodden feather in someone’s arms. She dreams of bitter cold and a burning ache in her bones and joints, she dreams of snow, and she dreams of men. The faces of Bran and her brother Jojen rise and bloom and fade like dying flowers, but where they dissipate Ben’s face remains. Solemn and thin, bearded and smudged with soot from a thousand small campfires. Comforting and constant throughout the past several months. It is why when she wakes and does not see him, Meera sits bolt upright and lets loose a scream of panic.

Or at least, it was meant to be a scream. What comes out of her mouth is closer to a wheeze and tastes of herbs and wine, but it carries enough alarm and fear that the woman sitting at her bedside immediately stands and rushes over. Meera sinks back into a dizzy slouch against the pillows, the strength ebbing from her in an instant.

“You’re awake at last, milady,” the woman says with a toothy smile. “I’ve been sitting with you for so long now, but I _told_ Sam, I said, ‘Sam, that brave lady was dressed in rags and dropped right at death’s door, and I’ll not be leaving her to wake up on her own, if she wakes at all.’ I said- oh, not that we didn’t think you’d be waking, milady, strong thing that you are,” the woman says hastily, reaching over to squeeze Meera’s hand. “Though you _did_ look very poor when you and Lord Stark arrived. I said, ‘I’ll be the one to help there,’ and I bathed and dressed you myself, with Lady Sansa’s help, of course. I’m not as strong as Lord Stark, to be carrying you around like you’re nothing but a sack of flour,” she says with a tittering giggle.

Meera stares at this doe-eyed girl before looking down at herself, and sure enough she’s in a fresh nightshift she doesn’t recognize, with a gauzy shawl around her shoulders. She can see the bindings around her breasts she has worn for years are finally gone, and she flushes hot in the cheeks. _Did Ben? Or did – who_ is _this person,_ she thinks, looking back at her guileless nursemaid, and she spends so many long seconds blinking at her in confusion that the other woman finally says _Oh_ and shakes her head with a laugh.

“Would you look at my manners, sitting here going on and on. I wager you don’t remember me one bit, though I remember you,” she says with a smile as she turns to pour water into a flat-bottomed cup made of horn. “My name is Gilly. Here now, drink up. Sam said you’ll be thirsty after so much dreamwine.”

“Where is, ah,” she says, wincing at the dryness of her throat, and Meera nods her thanks when she takes the cup from Gilly and drinks it down, one scratched up swallow at a time. “Where is Ben? Lord Stark, I mean. Benjen,” she recalls with a frown and a shake of her head that makes it throb. _Of course he’s a Stark._ She presses her fingertips to her temple, as if to stop a top from spinning. When did he tell her that, his real name?

“Shhh,” Gilly says, reaching over and gently plucking the empty cup from Meera’s hand. “Lord Benjen is fine, however boggy-headed he was when you two arrived. He’s still sleeping, though his fever was not as bad as yours. You both have been asleep for quite some time. Days, really,” she says with a sympathetic smile.

“He was sick,” Meera murmurs. “He carried me all the way, ever since the Wall when I fell off my horse, and he was sick too?” _Did I know that? I think I knew that,_ she thinks. Her head on his chest, the burn of a fever.

“Sam- he’s maester Tarly now,” she says proudly. “He remembers you, by the way, and fondly – he thinks Lord Stark had a broken rib too, but he’s been seen to, and well. My Sam is _very_ smart,” she says with a nod. “Now let’s focus on  _you_ , Lady Meera,” she says, and that reminds her.

“How do you know my name?” she asks with a frown, looking down at her fingers, lacing them so they look like ribs. _Poor Ben. Poor, brave Ben._

“Why, I _met_ you, milady, at that nasty old gate in the Wall, if you’ll remember,” she says.

Gilly pours her another cup of water, which Meera holds with both hands as she gazes unseeing at the fire on the other side of the room. She and Benjen went through the Black Gate a sennight past, and she shivered while he spoke the vows to open it up. But it was deserted, nary a man or beast to be seen let alone a clean-fingered woman like the one sitting here. No, it was half-haunted and falling apart, as dark and dank as it was when she went through the first time with—

_Oh._

“You were there,” Meera whispers, slowly turning her head to regard Gilly, who nods with her hands folded in her lap, eyes wide and honest above a small smile. “All that time ago, you were there.”

“Aye, milady, I was there, with Sam and baby Sam, though I had to give him up for a while. I’ve got him back though, milady,” she says, eyes sliding to the pitcher on the bedside table as she fingers the handle of it. “I was terrible worried I never would, but I did. But yes, we were there. And your brother was also, wasn’t he, and the young man with the wolf and his giant as well. Although I saw _far_ bigger giants after that. Gods, the things I’ve seen,” she says with a shake of her head.

 _My brother._ _He’s gone, and Bran too in a way, and poor Hodor,_ she thinks of saying, but the words are heavier than stones to her now, and she’d not let them all fall out of her, just yet, for fear of simply floating away, a bubble of a woman, full of nothing but released sorrow. _No, not nothing,_ she thinks, her mind’s eye conjuring up the image of a long, serious face, eyes the color of the sky reflected on water, strong arms, a laugh like flint striking. And now she finds she’s crying.

“Ben,” she whispers.

“To be true, milady, he’s just fine. I swear it,” Gilly says, gazing at Meera with concern. “When we found you two half drowned and sleeping out in the hot spring, one of the first things he said when he come to was, “Ignore me,’ and ‘tend to her, tend to Meera,’ he said. That’s _you_ , milady,” Gilly says with a bright, gossipy smile and the lift of her eyebrows. “He thought only of you, ‘til my Sam brought him milk of the poppy and they carried him up to his chambers.”

“He said my name,” she says with something of a marvel, pausing to sip more water before she hands the cup back to Gilly.

  _Did I tell him my real name? When did—_ and then she remembers him, the near warm loom of him above her, the curl of steam and the way his snow-damp hair hung in his eyes as he held her in the warmest water Meera has ever felt. She hugs herself and feels utterly alone all of a sudden, leans back on the soft puff of pillow and closes her eyes. _He said my name,_ and there is a sort of flooding feeling of warmth, relief maybe, to think of Ben saying _Meera._ She wipes her cheeks with shaking fingers, thinking she’ll find tears there, but there’s nothing.

“Would you listen to me? Prattling on while you lie here, worn out and still in your sick bed. I should be ashamed of myself, and I am,” Gilly says, brushing her hands down her skirts as she gets to her feet. “I’ll tell my Sam – that’s maester Tarly to you,” she says with a beam, “I’ll tell him to come check on you. Your fever only broke a few hours ago.”

Meera’s eyes fly open and she sits up again. “No, wait, please,” she says. If she’s been sleeping for days the last thing she wants is more of it, not when she needs to see him. “Could you take me to see Ben? Lord Stark, I mean.”

Gilly frowns, chews her lower lip a moment as she regards her, that intense scrutiny making her look as much a maester as any scholarly man. “I’m not sure, milady. He’s been asleep this whole time and you need to save your strength. But what I can do now is go get you some food. You’re thinner than that sheet your dugs were wrapped up in.”

 _Save my strength for what, more bedrest?_ Meera thinks with a blush. She shakes her head vigorously, and it only pounds a little, this time. “Please, I- I owe him so much and I just want to see him, to see that he’s all right.”  _I have seen him every day for gods know how long,_ she thinks,  _and it does not do to have a day where I don’t._

There is a desperate sort of worry welling up in her, a strange sort of panic that she will be isolated and kept captive here, that it is another trap and another thing to flee. But she reminds herself she is here with Starks and Ben is _Benjen_ , that he is a Stark too.  _Reeds trust Starks,_ she thinks, even though he was never a Stark to her, in the beginning, though he always had her trust.

“Gilly, please let me see him. I- aside from my father, he’s all I have left.”

 

Sansa smiles down at her son, marveling at how good he already is at pulling himself up, and she sits in the chair by her bedchamber window, watching him crawl and toddle and fall on the thick layers of blankets she’s woven and knitted herself. Young Eddard has her hair and fair complexion, though his eyes are no bluer than his namesake’s or his father’s, and Sansa is content to keep it that way.

“You’re the perfect blend of your mother and father, my handsome boy,” she says, glancing to the little table on which she rests her elbow. Sansa picks up a ribbon, offers the dangling end to her son, and he stops to post himself up on chubby knees and snatch it before falling back to his hands. Sansa laughs, turns to get another one of her ribbons from the table when she sees Satin sprint past the door, only to double back and hang his upper body into the room.

“The Skagosi party have arrived, Your Grace,” he says with a roll of his eyes as he rights himself to stand straight in the doorway. “Some of your brother’s men set a cottage on fire in Winter town, and Jon’s out hunting with Harwin and Ghost.”

“Oh for—” Sansa presses her fingertips to her forehead, inhales sharply and gazes upwards, counts to five and smiles back to her husband’s steward as kindly as she can. “Thank you, Satin. I’ll follow you; I think Gilly is still at Meera’s bedside. She’s in the chambers we were going to set aside for Shireen, but no matter. I doubt my brother will want her parted from him, anyhow,” she says, and Satin nods and disappears. “Come on, wee prince. Let’s go meet your godless uncle,” she says, sending up a small prayer for her own bedridden one.

Her brother is fully dressed for once in his life when he and his wife come riding in through the East Gate, his shoulders draped in furs just as his wife’s though hers are white where his are grey. Shaggydog trots in and Sansa wrinkles her nose when he blurs past with his muzzle and teeth and tongue stained red with blood. Sansa wonders if that was from another Winter town mishap. She turns away from the sight to regard the newest influx of visitors.

They look near as ruthless as the people they rule, Shireen with her black hair braided with silver and bone, Rickon with dark twisting designs etched into his skin, all the way up his throat and down to his ungloved hands. Impressive sights though she prefers the quiet seriousness of Jon’s eyes and the gentle of his hands to these displays of savagery. But they are all smiles and laughter amongst the shirtless men of their guard, and the sight of them makes Sansa’s heart swell with happiness. Despite whatever she’s lost, that which she’s found and cultivated is real, thick and sweet like honey.

“Are you pillaging and plundering your way to Winterfell, brother?” Sansa snips, trying for stern as Rickon reins up beside her, mid-laugh from something Shireen has said to him in a language Sansa cannot understand.

“Aye, if a man hunting on the road to feed his woman is a pillage, if one accidental fire is a plunder,” he says with a shrug, voice accented from the harsh Skagosi tongue as he swings down from his mount. “After me, little doe,” he murmurs, turning to help his pregnant wife from her horse, and just like that he turns from crass to kind, salt to sweet with his hands on her broadened waist.

“Forgive my husband, Lady Sansa,” Shireen says once her boots touch the snow and mud, her hands still on Rickon’s broad shoulders. “He only grows worse, the more time goes by. There’s no hope for him,” she says with affection, running her fingers through his hair as she gazes up at him with eyes soft from love.

Rickon scoffs, kisses her scaled rough cheek before slapping her on the rear and turning to Sansa. “Well, come now, sister, where is my welcome? Hmm? The last time I saw you it was for battle and now it is for your son,” he says, striding towards her with his arms outstretched. Shireen sweeps in to take Eddard from her arms, and before Sansa can help it she’s hauled up in a mighty bear hug. She is half terrified he will slap  _her_  on the behind once he sets her down.

“Put me down this  _instant_ , Rickon. I am with child again, you must be more careful.”

“All the more reason to be merry,” he says with a laugh as he sets her down. Rickon slings his arm across Shireen’s shoulders, gazing fondly down at the crown of her head as she hands a squirming Eddard back to Sansa. “The realm needs more Starks.”

“Have I got news for you, then,” Sansa says, unable to keep the smile away as she smooths her skirts and looks up at her brother.

It’s all they can do to keep Rickon from barging into Benjen’s rooms when they tell him he’s here, Sansa having to assure him repeatedly that he has yet to wake. Jon’s return with six pheasants is enough to distract him for the time being, thankfully, and the five of them sit together at the far table in the warm kitchens, nursing heated spiced cider and eating dried plums as they wait for the birds to be plucked and spitted.

“I cannot believe it,” Rickon says between swallows of cider, his booted feet crossed at the ankle on the corner of the table. “After so many years, he’s back. What was it? Four?” Rickon pauses to count on his fingers.  “Or five? _However_ many years gone by, only to materialize outside your gates,” he says with no small amount of wonder, eyes wide and expression one of wonder beneath the scruff that ages his boyish face.

“May the old gods be praised, and the new,” Shireen says, though she makes no mention of her late father’s once mighty god. She rests her hand on the swell of her belly, making Sansa smile.  _Winter is Coming,_ she thinks with her father’s voice. A _s are future Starks to fill it,_ she adds with her own.

“I never thought I would see him again,” Jon says, dandling Eddard on his knee, half distracted by the boy’s coos. “I feel more and more the lucky man with each passing day.”

“Will he stay on with you here, now that the Night’s Watch is ended?” Shireen asks, popping half of a plum in Rickon’s mouth before eating the other portion.

“I’m not entirely sure, to be true,” Jon says thoughtfully, passing Sansa their son before resting his elbows on the table as he leans forward. “I’m not sure _what_ he’s aware of, much less what he wants to do. I don’t even think he knows about Daenerys down in Kings Landing or how I came to be King, here. He thought I was still meant to be on the Wall, when he first saw me,” he says, glancing over at Sansa.

 _And he thought you were Ned and I was Cat,_ she thinks sadly, but she does not put voice to those thoughts.

“Meera herself seemed unaware when Gilly and I dressed her. I assume Benjen is the same,” she says, taking a sip of cider.

“ _Meera_  is here? Meera Reed?” Rickon says mid-chew, dropping his feet from the table as he sits up straight. His jaws work the plum before he swallows it, and hauntings drift in the vivid green of his eyes, eyes that once were blue but changed with the arrival of his direwolf.

“Yes, she is. She and Benjen crossed paths beyond the Wall at some point, I assume, and I think he agreed to bring her home. I’m unsure of the details. They’ve both been so ill, so exhausted, she hasn’t even woken, really,” she says. “Why? Do you know her?”

“Sansa. Meera and her brother were with Bran, the last I saw her,” Rickon says, voice deep and dark enough to match the fire-blackened stone hearth next to them.

“Well _that’s_ news,” Sansa says, half angry that there are still mysteries between them all, that Rickon has never shared this before. Her brother shrugs and they all sit and stare at each other in silence.

With a gust of cold air and the bang of the door against the wall Gilly bustles into the kitchens with an empty tray under her arm. Startled, the four of them turn as one to look up at her. Eddard dribbles plum onto his chin, squawks indignantly when Jon does not offer him a second morsel.

“The poor lady is as thin as a twig, I swear,” she says to the girls plucking and dressing the pheasants, squeezing past them to make her way to the larder. “I’m no maester, but even I know that she needs more than dreamwine and broth.”

“We’ll feed her when she wakes, Gilly,” Sansa says gently as she leans over Jon’s lap to take Eddard. “Until then, it would just go to spoil, sitting there.”

“Then you’ll be feeding her now, or at least I will,” she says, poking her head out of the larder, not fazed in the slightest to find her lord and lady, her king and queen, sitting here amongst hanging strands of onions and garlic. She points a potato towards the entire table and collectively they all sit back in their seats as if she brandishes wildfire instead of a tuber. “That poor girl is awake and near tears, she’s so exhausted, but I told her, I said ‘milady, what I can do is—”

 But Sansa figures none of them listen, considering the speed with which they all leap to their feet, even Shireen with her big belly. Indeed she thinks they none of them can even _hear_ Gilly anymore, what with the way they turn over chairs and shove back benches as they hurry out of the kitchen, they are all in such a haste to find out what their guest knows of the past and what that could mean for the future.

 

Meera stands in the empty hallway listening to the fade out of Gilly’s feet on the stone stairway, her hand pressed to warm stone as she stares at the wood grains of the closed bedchamber door. She does not want to disturb him if he’s sleeping but the pull and need and thrum to be near him is over-strong, and so lightly, ever so lightly, she pushes down on the metal handle to see if it’s locked.

It isn’t, and on slow and silent hinges the heavy door swings open into a room similar to hers but nowhere near as warm. She pulls Sansa’s borrowed dressing gown and fur-lined shawl tighter around her shoulders with one hand, lifting up the hems with the other so she can walk into Benjen’s room.

He is shirtless and facing away from her, sitting on the edge of his bed with his head bowed. The long and the lean of his back is curved like a willow branch as he inspects a tightly bound dressing around his ribs, and she frowns, bites her lip when she wonders if his rib truly is broken.

“Ben?”

It’s a whisper, almost too weak to cross the room to him, but still it makes him jump, just like it used to, and he gets to his feet and turns so swiftly he staggers back two steps.

“J- Meera,” he says with a long sigh, his fingers abandoning the gauze as he regains his balance with a stabilizing grip on one of the four bed posts. Oh how lovely it is, to hear him say her name, and it makes her smile, brings heat to her cheeks.

Benjen smiles back, maybe for the same reasons, and she feels slick and warm on the inside at the sight of him, like the melting of ice or the drizzling of sweet frosting, and that makes her remember his words.

“Where are those fine little cakes you promised me?” she says, and he pauses a moment before he recalls their fevered conversation with an exhale and laugh.  _He was sick too, almost the entire time._

“Tell my niece and she’ll ply you with them. Do you know, she is acting Lady of Winterfell now?” he says, reaching for the tunic at the foot of his bed, and his subsequent groan when he tries lifting it over his head tells her all she needs to know about broken bones. “I thought,” he grunts, “she was,” a wince, “her mother.”

“Here, let me help you,” she says, stepping forward and letting go of her robe and shawl to help him get the shirt onto his arms and over his head. 

“Stupid bloody bastard. Who stabs someone with the hilt of a knife,” he mutters from deep inside the tunic, and she laughs at his grumbling as she helps him pull it down to cover him up. She watches the pale of his skin disappear under the wheat colored garment, remembers floating in the hot spring, near naked in his arms. 

“All better,” she murmurs to the floor, still inches away from him, her fingers brushing out nonexistent creases in the trunk of his shirt.

“Thank you,” he says with a light, careful smile when she finally looks up at him. 

“It’s the least I could do, considering all you’ve done for me,” she says, and when the robe and shawl slide off of one of her shoulders they both reach to lift it back into place, their hands brushing and freezing in a hover over her slouched sleeve.

Meera is acutely aware of how her unbound breasts make small peaks of her nightshift now that the weight of the robe no longer fully covers her, and her heart pounds as she watches his gaze flick down for the briefest of moments. She slowly lowers her hand, gazes up at his serious face as his hand flexes back to life. Gently, carefully, Benjen closes his long fingers around the robe, pulling it up her arm before retrieving the shawl, and one by one he drapes the layers back in place. She tries in vain to ignore the sweep of a shiver these lightest of touches send down her spine as a result.

“You owe me nothing, Meera,” he says quietly, rubbing the soft wool of her shawl between his thumb and finger before taking a step back, and for a moment she wonders if the fever has returned, she is suddenly so lightheaded and weak on her feet. “Come on, sit by the fire. We’ve only just got the chill out of you.”

With halting difficulty he drags one of two fireside chairs closer to the merry dance of flames, gesturing towards it before he backs up and sits in the one across from it. Meera thanks him, curls up in the offered seat with her legs folded beneath her, and he smiles as he watches her tuck the over-long skirt of her dressing gown all around her.

They regard one another for some time, a silence unhindered by anxiety or discomfort, at least for her. It’s good to see him clean and in fresh clothes, to seem him relatively well rested, thin as he looks in the flit and flicker of firelight on his features. It’s good to look at him with the luxury of safe walls around them.  But then she thinks about all the half-truths and blatant lies they’ve told one another, and she tilts her head as she studies him.

“Benjen Stark, first ranger of the Watch,” she muses, thinking of all she knows of him from her father’s stories, coupled and contrasted with all she’s found out about him over the past year or so.

He rests his elbows on the armrests of his chair, steepling his fingers just beneath his chin. “Meera Reed, lady of Greywater Watch,” he replies after several moments. “What was a highborn crannogwoman  _truly_  doing that far north of the Wall, anyways?”

She takes a deep breath because she does not mind, handing these heavy stones to Benjen, not after they have shared so much, not after everything he’s done. She exhales, lets it loose and then tells him everything about Bran and Jojen, about Leaf and the three eyed crow. He frowns as he listens, lowers his eyes when she stops speaking at last.

“The boy in the tree,” he whispers, turning his head to gaze in the fire a moment. “You mentioned him a few times, tossing and turning all night. ‘There he is, he’s there, he can see, he can hear.’” He shakes his head a moment before he stops and looks back at her, squinting as if he is nearsighted and trying to discern new shapes. “That one afternoon, halfway to the Wall, that one day with the music. Was that—was that _him_ , was that Bran?”

“I think so,” she whispers, more tears coming to flood her vision, and she wipes them away with the back of her hand.

“Then- Then _all_ of those fantastical things I blamed on the fever, _all_ were true?” He is looking at her keenly, his gaze flitting across her face as if she were a page written in a language he didn’t understand. She clears her throat, glances down.

“Well, I, I don’t recall _all_ of them, but everything to do with my brother and Bran, yes.”

That keen look of his is gone, replaced with calm when she looks back at him. Calm, and a little weariness. He nods. “I should have believed you, Meera. I’m sorry,” he says with a sigh, lifting his hands to draw his shoulder length hair back and away from his eyes. Eyes she knows the blue of now, even with her eyes closed, even in the dark.

“But Ben, how were you to know? It was far easier to believe some wildling man stole me for his spear wife then strange words wrung out of a fever dream,” she says.

“Not  _that_ easily,” he says, so quietly she wonders if she heard him correctly. “Instead, you were all alone out there with the wights and the Others,” he murmurs, making her shiver and burrow deeper in Sansa’s clothing.

“Until _you_ found me, yes. A wildling man named Ben,” she says, and they smile together again before his disappears under the weight of another frown.

“But here’s one thing I don’t understand,” he says, leaning forward, his elbows resting now on his knees, his hands clasped lightly between them. “If you didn’t really know who I was, why did you ask _me_ of all people to take you below the Wall?”

She thinks back on it, briefly, and then she smiles with a shrug and a shake of her head. “I just knew to trust you. We Reeds are loyal to you Starks, even when we don’t know you, I suppose.” Meera smiles so broadly it’s almost a grin. “Perhaps somehow I knew you were  _my_  knight of the laughing tree.”

Here Benjen laughs, head bowed until he sits back in his chair. The laughter fades to a chuckle and then to a smile, faraway and close at once, amused and somehow sad all in one.

“Perhaps you’re my knight as well, Meera.”

She chuckles at that, shakes her head in the negative, and it’s only a little wet on the edges, only a little bitter at its core, considering she was half-dead when they got here. Her weakness is a bother to her; she was not raised to be someone’s burden.

“Yet you’re the one who saved my life.”

“I seem to recall you making a save or two on our journey. And besides,  _you’re_  the one who coaxed me to claim my own life back,” he says. “If not for you I’d still be beyond the Wall, withering away with men I did not trust, living a lie. I call that saving, Meera.”

But she is not to be outdone.

“If not for _you_ I would have died. Even if I had made it to the Wall by myself without being attacked by free folk or wights, the fever would have gotten me in the end,” she says, voice pitching high in the end, and she bows her head to try and hide the sudden fall of ashamed tears.

The gratitude she feels cinches with a squeeze on her heart as much as the aftershock of nearly dying, and together they mingle with something else entirely, something bundled up tight that bursts apart when Benjen pushes himself out of his chair to crouch by her chair. The weight of all they’ve been through together, like two unraveled cords now braided close, comes sliding through her, leaving her shoulders and traveling down her arms to her hands where he comes to clasp them in his own.  _He is here. He is still here with me,_  she thinks, blinking away the tears to gaze at their hands in her lap. He has given her more touch and kindness these past weeks than she has received in literal years, and woe to her, the day it all ceases.

“You would have done splendidly, Meera. Tough little thing you are, like you were shaped from driftwood,” he murmurs, his thumbs running across the knolls of her knuckles. “You fell ill, is all. It could happen to anyone.”

“It happened to you, though, didn’t it, ranger? It happened to you and still you sat your horse and went on, while I just- while I did nothing.”

“You held on to me for dear life,” he says, gazing up at her, the firelight warming one side of his face. It is all she can do not to free a hand and rest it there on his cheek, to feel the scrub of his beard she swears she felt on her brow, once.  _Did I get a kiss from him, just once, or did I dream it,_ she thinks sadly. “And I sat my horse because I made a promise. I had no choice.”

“What, do you mean your oath to the Night’s Watch?” she says with a sniff and a good, hard blink to make the tears fall and stay away. There are a lot of words to that oath, and she remembers few of them. She regards him as he shakes his head and smiles, and it’s sad and rather lovely, lost and also found, worn out and somehow all the stronger for it. Her heart beats, and she realizes with a rush of sudden clarity that it beats for him.

“No, Meera. The promise I made to you.”


	4. The vow.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> RAPID FIRE POSTING. Sorry not sorry but still sort of sorry, because I honestly can't help myself with these two.
> 
>  
> 
> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/137089309973/the-break-and-the-mend-chapter-4-she-looked)

Benjen was chopping wood outside his tent when the slim shouldered woman approached him one morning. The air was thick with fog and mist so cold it felt like a thousand miniscule, frozen gemstones stinging his cheeks, and her tread was so light and silent that he jumped when she rested a hand on his shoulder.

“Seven hells, Jo, you scared me,” he exhaled, annoyed at being so easily caught unawares. He blamed it on her being so tiny, on the pale of her skin and clothing.  _That long dark hair of hers, though,_  he thought, squinting down at her through the muzzy post-dawn fog. That he should have seen.

“I’m sorry,” she said, biting her lip and folding her arms across her chest. “I just—I was thinking about what you said last night over the fire. After supper, I mean. About having raided below the Wall, before.”

Benjen stilled at that for a fraction of a moment before he remembered himself, and he feigned nonchalance as he turned away from her and tossed his axe beside the small pile of wood he had made.

“Aye,” he said slowly. “I did, once. A long time ago. I can’t remember much,” he said.

All wildlings had some brag-rights story and Benjen figured with as many men and women claiming to have robbed crofts and climbed castle walls, he would fade into obscurity with the rest of them. Yet here stood this woman, her lip between her teeth as if it were slathered in something sweet, asking him for details.

“Oh,” she said, disappointment a dance across the fineness of her features. “Damn. Never mind, then. Sorry to scare you, Ben,” she said with a forced sort of smile, with such a bright and vivid flicker of pain and misery that he felt it in his very being.

“Jo, wait,” he said, reaching out to snag her by her arm, pleased to note she had put on weight since they found her all that time ago. Benjen pulled on her, just lightly enough to turn her around to face him again. “Why do you ask?”

She looked left and right around their small camp, at the tents still occupied with sleeping men and women, at the distant prowl of two men on watch. Jo stepped into him so closely the toes of her fur-wrapped boots touched his. She beckoned him come nearer, and so Benjen inclined his head, curved his spine as he hunched over her. She had lived with them for several months now, but it was the closest she’d ever stood by him.

“There never was a man named Arik,” she whispered in his ear. “I was never his spear-wife, never anyone’s spear-wife. I’m from a place called the Neck below the Wall, and I’m desperate to get home.  I’m—” she stopped herself, glanced around, and pulled him so close her mouth brushed the lobe of his ear. Her breath was warm, and Benjen repressed a shudder. “I’m the daughter of a highborn man there, and I can promise you an abundance of coin if you return me safely to my home.”

Benjen bent his knees and lowered his face to whisper back.

“What about the Others and the dead? It’s not safe, it hasn’t been for years.”  _It’s why I’ve_ been _out here for years,_ he wanted to tell her, a gift of honesty in exchange for the one she’d just now given him. But the last thing he wanted to do was admit within earshot of these free folk that he was a crow to the core, through and through, just biding his time until he could safely leave the Frostfangs. He had begun to think he’d never manage it, and his courage had slowly been replaced with resignation.

“I’ve been watching you, Ben, the way you move, how you track and hunt. If anyone can get me there, it’s you. I’ve been thinking about it for weeks now, and then last night when you told your story, it convinced me. Will you at least think on it? You’ll be handsomely rewarded, I swear it,” she whispered fiercely, reaching up to grip him by the upper arm. “Promise me you’ll at least  _consider_  it.”

Benjen stood there, stock still and silent in the center of their small ring of tents, wondering at the pull she had on him, deep in the center of his chest. He chalked it up to a desire to return to the Wall and his duties, to find out what happened to his brothers after Mormont was so brutally taken down. What a wretched day that had been, when that news swept like brushfire throughout the North. He had grown stagnant out here, leeched of hope each day until one felt more or less like the others. Until now, until this slip of a thing with her snapping-bright green eyes and that determined set of her chin walked up to him and stoked a fire in him he thought long dead. He covered her hand with his own for a moment, a press of his palm to her knuckles before he plucked at her hand and held it briefly in his own. Benjen shook his head.

“I don’t need to consider it, Jo,” he said. “I will do what you ask. I will take you home, and I am a man of my word.”

 


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Shit crap picset, my bad](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/137287492348/the-break-and-the-mend-chapter-5-now-he-stands)

They are gazing at each other, the air between them filling with things they’ve neither of them said before, things Benjen can feel, things he knows he shouldn’t, when there is a knock on the door. Jo – _no, she’s Meera, and it suits her better besides_ \- looks questioningly to him, leans forward as if to unfold herself from her cozy perch –  _would that it was for a kiss –_ but he shakes his head. He’d not have her disturbed, knowing how weary she’s been, having felt the strength slowly ebb from her body in his very arms.  _You’ve made me so warm, Ben._  He resists the urge to close his eyes, to close his fists back around that soft wool of her shawl and pull her near, because in the end she is not for him. Even if it felt like she was, for a brief time in that pool.

“Come in,” he calls as he releases her hands and returns reluctantly to his chair, somewhat guiltily because it likely comes across as laziness, but he has a fatigue in his old bones as well, has things he needs to tamp down and swallow before other people enter his room.

The door opens to an instant clamor and raucous that makes Meera’s eyes widen as she cranes her neck to look back at the spill of Starks that crowd his bed chamber.

“ _There_ she is,” Sansa says with something like relief, standing regal just like her mother, albeit now with a babe on her hip. Benjen stares.

“Uncle,” a tall young man with unbound hair says with a wide grin, pushing past the man he now knows is Jon. He is long of stride and broad of shoulder, a man grown with only the faintest trace of the leftover lankiness of boyhood.

“Robb?” Benjen says with a frown, and he is confused instantly because more time has passed than the length of this man’s beard suggests.

The chatter and chaos of so many people talking at once dies down immediately at his words, and he looks from his alleged nephew to the pregnant woman with the shock of greyscale on her face, up to Jon and finally to Sansa, who once more has tears in her eyes.  _I called her Catelyn and made her sob. I call this boy Robb and get tears once more._  It does not bode well, and there is a sick feeling in his stomach.

“I think perhaps Jon should speak with your uncle first,” the pregnant woman whispers to Sansa.

“Er, this is your  _other_  nephew,” Jon says with a backwards glance to the women, his serious face carefully arranged into an impassive expression as he steps forward to stand by the tall young man.  _Other nephew,_  he thinks faintly.  _Then where are the first and the mother and the father?_ The room seemed crowded at first, and now that he thinks back, suddenly it feels emptier than it should, if it is to be a reunion. “This is Rickon, uncle.”

“Rickon! You were but a boy when last I saw you,” Benjen says, moving his gaze from Jon to his brother’s youngest son.

“I could say the same about you,” Rickon says when he recovers his faded grin and steps forward, and they clap each other on the shoulders once Benjen gets to his feet. “Life beyond the Wall is a tough one, I wager?”

Benjen forces a smile, trying to meet lightness with ease though now he feels anything but. “More than I care to admit.”

“Though _you_ don’t look worse for wear,” Rickon says quietly, gazing down to wear Meera sits in her chair, curled up as cats do when they’ve found someplace warm. “Hello, Meera.”

“I feel it, believe you me,” she murmurs. “It’s good to see you again, Rickon. I did wonder if I ever would.”

“As did I,” he says.

“Meera, come with me, if you’re able,” Sansa says, passing the babe to the woman with greyscale and slipping past her younger brother to stand by Meera’s chair. “Gilly has seen to it that you’ve been brought extra dishes of food, and they’re waiting for you in your room along with a flagon of spiced wine to fortify you.”

Benjen glances from his estranged family down to Meera and automatically extends his hand to help her up. She accepts it with a smile, though he sees the disappointment in her face to be so dismissed, and in truth it sits ill with Benjen as well, until his niece whispers  _Jon needs to speak with Benjen._  That  _definitely_  doesn’t bode well.

“Go on, Meera. I’ll come find you after, see if I can get some of this extra food of yours,” he says, making her huff a laugh and roll her eyes.

“I’ll hold you to it,” she says, squeezing his hand before letting go, and it might as well be his heart, pained as it is to hold her, pained as it is to watch her go.

Benjen flicks his gaze away from her once she’s out into the hall, turns his attention back to Jon. “Go on, then. Give me your news and don’t bandy about.”

He stands on the inner wall facing south when Jon tells him what happened to Ned, to his wife and eldest son, when he learns of the treachery rained down upon the Starks. He had requested the walk on the wall for the fresh air but now he finds he likes the numbness the cold provides him. He listens and stares as his brother’s –  _no, my sister’s_ – son, the spitting image of Ned, recounts horror after horror after horror. A bloody battle for the throne, king after king after queen, dragons in the sky, a dragon on the southron throne and a dragon here on the northern one. And now he is the oldest remaining Stark, those that came before him having been completely destroyed, as if his House is a slate to be wiped clean. Benjen’s mind reels.

 It was over twenty years ago when he swore his vow to the Night’s Watch, twenty years of calling other men his brothers, twenty years of leaving behind one family to serve another and to serve the realm. But twenty years does little to drain away the suddenly overwhelming sorrow he is drowning in now.  _There is so much I have missed,_  he thinks, the whip of wind against his face, making him think of the ride down here from beyond the Wall. He wonders if the wind blew when his brother lost his head, if it whipped the Twins in vain when Catelyn and Robb were murdered. He wonders and he mourns and he feels as far away from his family as if he still stood in the Frostfangs, staring down at a lost, crannogwoman.

“I am the only one of my brothers and sister who lives,” he says after an undetermined stretch of time, here up high where the snow blows small and brittle and quick.  _It is not as high as the Wall,_ he thinks, suddenly and wretchedly homesick for Castle Black. A flash and vision of bright green eyes and a clever mouth, but he blinks it away.

“As am I, though I never knew them,” Jon replies, arms folded beneath his heavy cloak, bulking up his size and making him look every inch a king.

“I wonder which is better or worse, hmm? To know and to lose and to mourn, or to never know and always wonder.”

“I’ve wondered my entire life, to know my mother, to know where I came from, only to learn too late. I have always wanted to know,” Jon says. “And I have still mourned.”

“I always knew and yet I walked away, having lost them all, one by one. And now I’m the last, and now I’m alone,” Benjen says. He sees the faces of his family, blurred and faded, and he can pull up only Ned’s face with any sort of clarity or recollection. His heart feels hollow. “A just ending, perhaps, for a man who severed all of his ties.”

“But you’re _not_ alone,” Jon says, turning from the sprawling southerly view of the kings road and the snow-capped roofs of Winter town. “You’re here, we’re all here, those of us who survived. You have us, now.”

Benjen smiles sadly, drops his gaze to stare down at the murky waters between the walls.

 _And her,_ he allows himself to think, just for a moment.  _I have her until I deliver her home, and then I will have nothing but a twenty year old oath and a ragged cloak of black._

 

The most striking difference here to Shireen is the lack of wind shrieking and howling outside of her narrow chamber window, the lack of crashing waves a thousand feet below, waves that are as loud as ships breaking on rocks even at such a distance. It is quiet here, somber perhaps, but there are more ghosts in Winterfell than there are on Skagos, where men are too rapacious and insatiable to roam as specters. But it is warm and merry and bright in the little chamber that used to be Rickon’s as a boy, and he is busily intent on warming her in other ways, despite the approaching meeting she has with the king.  _Five more minutes,_  she thinks with a happy hum.

Shireen closes her eyes, tilting her head to the side as Rickon comes to stand behind her, as he folds his body around hers and buries his face against her neck. His fingers brush her hair away from the side of her throat, and he tilts his face to lick the outer shell of her ear. That makes her open her eyes. The love and curiosity he has for her greyscale is one thing, but she  _hates_  her ears.

“Ric, stop it,” she says despite her shiver and smile as his administrations send an army of tingles marching down her spine. “You know I don’t like it when people can see my ears.”

“I’m the only ‘people’ here,” he whispers to her in Skagosi, and where the language used to repel her now it is achingly arousing. “And I love your ears. They listen to all the dirty things I say to you,” he says, switching to the common tongue to paint an extremely colorful scenario.

“That’s  _enough_ , Rickon,” she laughs, pushing him off of her shoulder so she can stand from their chamber’s small desk in the corner of the room. 

“Never enough,” he says with a grunt as he adjusts himself shamelessly while she looks on with exasperated amusement.

“I’m only going up to Jon’s chambers. Sansa asked me to look over these figures for him, and I’ll be damned if you stop me,” she says.

“I don’t want you to go,” he says, switching back to Skagosi, the rough sound of it rasped like a cat’s tongue. But he pouts as he says it, as petulant and stubborn as a child, but then again he _is_ six years her junior, her man-child warrior. But what he lacks in refinement he makes up for in passion. “Either of you,” he says, pressing his hand to the crown of her belly.

“I won’t be gone long,” she murmurs in the same foreign tongue, not as smoothly as he does but passable, and just as she anticipated the sound of the language he’s come to call his own calms him, the way rubbing Shaggy’s ears makes him almost, almost pup-like. Shireen kisses her husband. “I won’t be gone long at all.”

“Please don’t, my little cannibal wife,” he says, grinning wolfishly as she rears back and slaps his arm.

“You know full well that was venison arranged to look like a man,” she says hotly of the Skagosi wedding ceremony that horrified and embarrassed her. She huffs, snatching up the half dozen scrolls from the desk and storming across the room. “The things I do, the things I  _put up with_ because of you, Rickon Stark.”

“Because you love me,” he calls out after her, cheerful and savage, reckless and free.

“More’s the pity,” she snaps over her shoulder, but she can’t help but laugh at the sight of him when he clutches his chest and falls to the floor, a feigned death of heartbreak at her admonishment.

She is still giggling from his antics when she knocks on Jon’s solar door, but it dies down soon enough when he bids her enter and she can see the look on his face.  He looks as sullen as Rickon does the morning after staying up all night drinking. Jon sits with his head in his hands and elbows on the carved table, fire at his back and huge white wolf curled up on the floor near his feet. He barely acknowledges her presence, though in the corner at a small writing desk, his steward swiftly stands and bows his head before returning to his seat.

“Jon, are you all right?” She closes the door behind her and leans back against it, drawing her hair over her ears.

“I just had to relive it all, telling my uncle what has happened to us all in his absence,” Jon says with a sigh. “He was gutted, and now all I can see when I close my eyes is Robb,” he says. “None other haunt me like he does, though it’s been ages since I dwelled on him so.”

“I’m so sorry,” she murmurs with a frown. “Would you like me to come back at another time?” Shireen glances at the window and the dark sky beyond it, where the sun has long since slid out of view. “Tomorrow, maybe?”

“No, no, stay. Sansa told me she asked for your help and I am grateful. This upheaval of my uncle and Meera’s arrival has made me worthless today. I truly appreciate your help. Come and sit.”

“Of course, Your Grace,” she says with a small smile, walking in the room and sitting on the other end of his large table.

Sansa had given her pages of figures and numbers and disputes between mountain clans, and she hadn’t realized the connections between them all until she realized that what some men were lacking, others had an abundance of – on Skagos.

“It’s an island of raiders with little place to spend the riches they pillage, and the land is poor for crops. The bread is hard and thin, little better then tack there. We could easily set up a way to do trade for grain, for wheat and millet and rye. They’ve the coin for it, and the obsidian, if anyone still has need for them now that there are no Others. I rather like it as a gemstone, myself,” she says, fingering the bracelet of black and silver on her left wrist.

“No one would trade with a Skagosi for fear of losing his head,” Jon says dubiously, pouring wine into two cups, offering her one before draining half of the other. “Or becoming a meal,” he adds dryly.

Shireen rolls her eyes.

“You forget your good-brother, Jon. Rickon has, well. Let’s just say he’s mastered the art of impressing the folk on that rock. They will do as he says, and if he says to trade  _amicably,_  then they will do it. I am not so easily ignored either,” she says, tipping her face to better expose the greyscale. "They think me a witch,” she whispers, making Jon chuckle.

“You’ve given me good food for thought, and much of it,” he says as he takes another swallow of wine and sits back. “I think more and more how I have need for an advisor of sorts. Nothing so serious as a Hand, mind you, not up here where my needs are relatively low. But to have someone in an advisory position here would be a boon. Sansa does what she can but she’s busy with Winterfell’s upkeep and Eddard. Would you ever consider it, Shireen?”

She takes a sip of wine and sits back in mirror of the king, regards him evenly a moment. “I would consider it, yes. Rickon, on the other hand, would hate it. Put the idea to paper and he would tear it to shreds, if he could read it. He loathes the idea of leaving his beloved island. I had to convince him to come even on this journey.”

“Aye, the man’s more at home there than ever he was here,” Jon says with a smile.

“I do have my ways around him, though,” Shireen smiles back, because she has several, now.

She thinks of the dance they did around one another, the first tentative steps when her father set the match before his death, and the now dizzying reel when they come together. Never did Shireen think she would be happy with him, when first she set eyes on him, striding down the beach naked as his first name day, holding a spear with an eel on the end of it, his wolf as black as the Skagosi sand. Now they swim naked together in the Shivering Sea, though she has never developed a taste for eel.

“I have my ways, and I will consider it. Now, about your uncle,” she says with another small sip of wine. “Did he receive no comfort, learning about the Night’s Watch?”

Jon hesitates, glances in his cup, and pours more wine. “Ah,” he says. “About that. I didn’t think- it was just so much, Shireen, telling him about our family. How could I throw more change on him? How could I continue to uproot him from the life and the world he’s known? The two of them just woke up today, for pity’s sake.”

“For pity’s sake is why you should have told him,” Shireen says, trying to master and tamp down the wisp of exasperation she feels. She knows he has love with Sansa, just as she has love with Rickon. It should be as obvious to him as it is to her. “Did you not see the two of them together?”

Jon shrugs. “They’ve traveled a long way together. Comrades in arms. Besides, there’s a good chance they already know, if they went across the wall at Castle Black. It’s as abandoned as the rest of them.”

“Sansa told me he mistook you for Ned, having thought you still at the Wall,” Shireen says.

Jon has no answer for her.

“At any rate, these ‘traveling companions,’” she says, sitting up to set her cup down, struggling only a little under the growing obstacle of her belly and kicking babe. “They toss and turn from illness and dreamwine, for what, days? And the first thing they do in this place is seek one another out, and not you? Not Sansa? Call you that mere comrades, or call you that something more?”

Jon rubs the stubble on his chin as he gazes at her so intently Shireen thinks he gazes through her now as he ponders her words. He opens his mouth once to speak, goes so far as to lift a hand, but in the end he stays silent. She smiles as graciously as she can with half her face hardened, and gets to her feet.

“I think I’ll take my leave, if that’s all right. All this kicking makes me weary,” she says with a hand on her belly.

Jon nods, says _Of course,_ and bids Satin escort her to her chambers, and she leaves him deep in thought.

“Are all you men so obtuse at times?” she says with a deep sigh as Satin offers her his arm to take the stairs.

“Well, milady, I wouldn’t rightly know now, would I? Being one and all,” he says with a grin.

Shireen laughs, and when they round the corner nearest her room she shoos him off to finish his duties instead of wasting his final evening hour with her.

She is still chuckling as she walks the remaining paces to her door when the sight of a man drifting down the hall catches her eye and makes her catch her breath as well. He looks up at the sound of it and she recognizes Rickon’s uncle, though he does not seem to know her. Indeed he seems to fade into the stone as he turns the corner and heads up the other set of stairs, and she remembers what Jon had told her earlier.  _Tonight he very well might be a ghost, himself,_  she thinks with a twinge to her heart, and quickly she closes the distance to her chamber, to warm herself up with life and love.

 

He stood on the inner wall for over an hour, long after Jon quietly excused himself, stood there until he felt nothing, anymore, fingers numb in their gloves, toes dull unfeeling weight in his boots as he watched the slow slide of the sun high above the thin layer of clouds. When the world seemed hushed from its dip towards the western horizon, Benjen left the wall for the godswood, to touch the heart tree and wonder if his nephew could hear him and see him. And then he stood naked in the largest of the hot spring pool, alone save for the steam and the weirwood as he scooped hot water over his head, over and over, wondering what it is to drown, wondering if a man can drown himself even on dry land.

Now he stands in front of Meera’s bedchamber door, water still dripping from his hair down the back of his cloak, knuckles still resting against the wood after his knock. The sconces that are still lit are only feebly aflame, the hallway near dark on account of it, and he blinks owlishly when her door opens and a rectangle of vivid orange glow casts out around him. Now she stands before him, backlit with heat, her face tilted up towards his as she regards him. She is sweetness and sorrow, the very last apple on the branch.

“I hoped it was you,” she breathes, hand on the door as she steps back to bid him entry, and he obeys, accepts the invitation, walks into her room, each step feeling like the splinter of a vow. “Will you share my food with me, then?”

“I am not hungry, Jo,” he says. Too fatted on knowledge and grief and too starved of what he really wants. And then he hears himself. “Meera.”

He keeps his back to her but listens to the sounds of her, the faint shuffle and slide of slippers too big for her on stone and rug, the swish of her robe as she gathers it up over her arm so she can walk without tripping. If not for the oversized shoes she would move silently, smooth like a ribbon in a stream. He knows her. He knows her and yet she is depthless and he knows nothing. Benjen stands in front of her unbanked fire and closes his eyes.

“Did you know?” he says quietly, when he can feel her at his side, her head barely reaching his shoulder. His heart is heavy and yet here it is, racing in the cage of his ribs from the nearness of her. “Did you know about Robb and Cat?”

“No,” she whispers. “Sansa told me here, after we left your rooms, after she asked about Bran. I’m so sorry, Ben.”

“Did you know about my brother? About Ned in Kings Landing?” he says, finally opening his eyes and turning towards her.

Meera begins to shake her head but she stops herself with a ragged suck of breath through her teeth. A hand flies to her mouth as she stares up him, green eyes gold from the fire, and a new dawn of realization seems to sweep her over. Trembling, she slowly nods her head in the affirmative.

“It was so long ago, and so much happened between our finding out and coming to Winterfell. What Theon did and- and then Ramsay. It was something that happened so far away when so much was happening all around us, here. The world broke apart, Benjen,” she says, his full true name sounding almost wrong on her tongue, and now he misses the simplicity of being just Ben to her. “I’m so sorry. I haven’t been thinking clearly, since we got here, I haven’t- oh, I’m just so sorry,” she says.

It’s a strange echo of riding here with her, when she raises her arms and winds them around his neck, pulling him down in an embrace of condolence, and he very nearly has to bend at the waist to give her full access. But this hold she has on him is warm now and flooded with life and some of her renewed strength, when she holds him tight and firm and shows no signs of stopping until he lifts his arms to embrace her in return.

“I’m so sorry,” she repeats in his ear, low and hushed, dust blowing across stone. One of her hands lifts off his back and it hovers a moment until he has the light touch of her palm on the back of his skull. Benjen closes his eyes again.

“Thank you,” he says after some time, and he lets her hold him up this go round, drops his chin to her shoulder before he tucks it and rests his forehead there. Tiny but strong, even just a few days after standing just this close to death, she holds him with the stretch and backward arch of her spine to support him, as she combs her fingers through his hair.

“Are you- Did you get wet?” she asks with a gust of incredulity, her fingers sifting through the damp, twisting the ends of his hair in inspection.

Benjen exhales through his nose. “Yes, from the hot springs. Tried as I might, I could not wash it all away.”

“I would have liked to have gone, myself,” she murmurs.

Benjen tightens his arms around the narrow of her waist a moment before he lifts his head and loosens his grasp on her, and he stands straight and gazes down her. He shakes his head.

“I would not have trusted myself, had you come with me.”

“You trusted yourself the first time,” she says quickly, her breath coming in rapid and shallow, and now everything about her seems molten, the rise and fall of her chest, the dark of her hair set to chestnut and the pale of her skin set to warmed up cream.

“You were sick, then. Now you’re- you’re,” he trails off, lifting a hand to tug at a long lock of her hair, and he wants to finish with  _perfect,_  but it wouldn’t really be the finish for him. “Now you’re simply you, and that is too much.”

“I’ve always been me, though, and I’ve always been here,” she says, dropping her gaze to his chest, and he is too trapped in the snare of her to stop her when she unclasps his cloak. “And you’ve always been—”

“A wildling, hmm?” he asks, lifting and sifting his fingers in her hair, pushing them in to the third knuckle, so deep that he’d have a handful of it, were he to close his fist instead of comb it to the ends. “Just some strange man who could steal you away?”

“ _Ben_ ,” she whispers, hands on his chest now that she’s pushed the cloak off his shoulders. “You’ve always been Ben, to me,” she says.

She steps into him, hands sliding around his middle, fingers a light drag against his tunic and the wrap of bandage beneath it. He’d wince in pain but she could pluck his broken rib like the string of a lute and he’d sing just the same. His other hand lifts to cup her cheek. He is loss and emptiness, scraped out clean, he is desolation and abandonment. He is the man who turns his back and walks away, unless he is with her.

“I’m not just some free folk savage, though,” he says, inclining his head to kiss the crown of hers, and he closes in on impulse when she gasps and shudders and presses her face against his chest at the gesture. Self-control seems such an easy thing to abandon, even after twenty years’ practice, and his body is the first to betray him. “I’m not even just a Stark. I’m a man of the Night’s Watch and you know what that means, Meera.”

“Not to me. To _me_ you’ve always been Ben. Just be him right now, like before,” she says, kissing his chest through his clothing, her arms snaking back up to wind themselves over his shoulders. If she can feel the hardness of him, she does nothing to shy away from it; if anything she’s a tighter press against him, and it makes him groan. For months he’s wondered what it would be like, and now it’s here, and now he has to back away from it.

“You know I can’t,” he says through the grit of his teeth, and she is flame now, more than some small woman of damp swampland, of hanging moss and clammy fog. Right now she is everything he wants and nothing to which he can lay claim. “My wife is duty, my mistress honor,” he says in a bitter mock of himself. The words taste like dirt now, when once they had the hot copper richness of blood, of coin more priceless than any man’s soul.

“Call me Honor then, tonight,” she says, hands in his hair, fingers closing firm as she pulls his head down to look at her. “Call me Duty, and do yours,” she whispers.

 _Duty,_  he thinks as he gazes down and sees for the second time today the rise and perk of her high little breasts, always hidden away from him after all this time. He wonders at the feel of them and their weight, wonders at the feel of the rest of her.  _She’s been in my arms for days but was never mine, not even for a moment._  His hands drop to rest on her narrow hips, and he kneads his fingers into them, just once for the feel of it. He knows her and yet he doesn’t know anything at all.  _Honor,_  he thinks as he steps back.

“I can’t, Meera. With you there can be no start, else there would be no end. Not with you. Not with me,” he says, his hands so empty now without her to fill them.

“Please, Ben.  _Benjen,_ ” she says with a hint of that old strum of strength. “Please don’t leave me. Don’t go. I need you. I need you and- and- and I  _love_  you,” she says, taking a quick step forward, stumbling on the long hem of her robe so that he must catch her to keep her righted. “I know now, I know it. I love you.”

_This is what it’s like to be broken._

“I can’t,” he repeats, watching the unhappy crumble of her features.  _So I do have her love,_  he thinks miserably,  _I have it and I can’t even keep it._  “I have nothing left but my oath, and I cannot turn my back on that, even now.”

“Yet you’d turn your back on  _me_?” she says angrily, her slender arms hugging herself tightly as she glares at him. Molten, a forest bird made of anger and love, green eyes that snap and sparkle.  _Love,_  he thinks. What bittersweet stuff to sup on.

“I’ll take you to the Neck as I promised but there I must leave you,” he mumbles against his hand as he wipes it across his mouth, as if to wipe away the desire to kiss her, to taste her, to devour all this love that he is not allowed to have. “I should not even go further south than this, but I will, for you.”

“ _Damn_  you,” she snaps, jerking her head away from him.

“What, Meera, would you have  _my_  head on a spike too now, for abandoning my post?” he retorts, because there’s still something of the wolf in him after so many years, because she does not own all the misery here, tonight.

With a whimper she looks back and shakes her head at him, and he relents and steps forward for one final embrace. She goes limp against him again though this time it is from heartbreak. It is worse than when she was slack from her illness. He rests his cheek on the top of her head and stares at her empty, unmade bed.

“Just tell me once, Ben, tell me true and then I’ll leave you alone. Could you- do you think you could have loved me too, if it weren’t for the Watch? For your oath?”

He holds her close.

“Oh, you silly woman,” he sighs. “I know I could, because I already do.”

Meera bursts into tears.


	6. The Save.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/137347958883/the-break-and-the-mend-chapter-6-ben-rounded)

They had found the little clearing butted up against a rocky outcrop yesterday, and its proximity to a thick tree line and a steep-banked gully with a narrow river in its bed made it ideal for more than a one night stay. Meera was relieved. Last night was the first time she had slept comfortably, pine needles her bed and Ben’s warmth closer than ever thanks to the depression in the earth that their tent was set up over.  And he hadn’t so much as touched her, so much as made an attempt to “steal” her. Soft, warm, and safe. She hadn’t felt any of those things in a long, long time, let alone all three at once.

She sat on a branch of a gnarled old weirwood to keep her arse up and out of the cold snow, fletching arrows and keeping a trained eye towards the narrow, deep-banked river off-shoot where Ben disappeared an hour ago. The branch was low enough for her to hop up on without much trouble, but still her foot swung free and clear of the snow she was trying to avoid. Meera hummed tunelessly to herself. It had been so long since she had heard music, but sitting there she found herself with “The Burning of the Ships” rolling round and round in her head. She sat undisturbed for another quarter of an hour before she heard distant splashing and the bellow of a man several degrees upriver from where Ben had gone. She stopped humming immediately.

Fearing the worst she tossed the unfinished arrow to the ground beneath her feet, took one of the completed ones from the quiver resting across her lap and nocked it. By virtue of a kicked up pulse her bare fingers were not numb, and she sat stone still with her arrow aimed in the direction of the splashes.

“Shhh,” she whispered when her shaggy little mare whickered with the bob of her head, glancing over to where the two horses stood hobbled together a short distance from the fire and their tent. Meera looked back towards the drop off of the riverbank in time to see Ben struggling to make his way up. She could see the scowl on his face, even from so far away.

“I thought you were the one meant to be fishing,” she said with a grin she couldn’t tamp down, once he was by her side. The poor man was drenched from the waist down, and his face was beet red from the cold, from the exertion, from the embarrassment of it all. “Not be fished.”

“Hold your tongue, Jo, I’m not in the mood,” he snapped, brushing loose hair from his eyes as he threw down a line of five fish, each no thicker than Meera’s two thumbs held side by side.

She laughed.

“Call you that a catch? Or are we to set traps for little mice with them?” she said, leaning over her knee to gaze at them.

Ben removed his cloak, glaring at her as he used what dry parts of it he could find to try and press out some of the water weighing down his breeches and the pelts wrapped round his boots and thighs.

“If you want to talk, go talk to the fish and tell them to grow fatter,” he muttered, straightening with another glower her way before tossing his sodden cloak beside the fire.  He began at once to untie the skins and fur from his legs.

“I don’t need to do that, I just need to go down there myself. Never let a wildling do what a crannogwoman could do in her sleep.”

Ben rounded on her. “Think you that I can’t catch a bloody thing, eh? I can catch _you_ well enough. Did the first time I saw you, and I can do it again now,” he said, and before she knew what he was about, he stalked over to her, bent down and grabbed her dangling foot, giving it so ferocious a yank she flew clean off the branch and landed in a drift of snow several feet away. Her bow and quiver went flying the opposite direction.

“What on- you horrible- how  _dare_ you,” she said, floundering in the thick snow, her knees higher than her head, her feet kicking futilely.

It was Ben’s turn to laugh.

“Here, go fetch yourself some mice,” he said, and before she knew it the thin line of fish was tossed onto her chest. Fish did not bother her; she’d eaten plenty of them raw in her life, but it was the insult that made her shout.

She was infuriated, now that she was so cold and damp when moments before she had been so high and dry, but by the time she struggled to her hands and knees and finally her feet, the expulsion of energy and the madness of it all had both stolen her breath. She stood there heaving, trying to get a gulp of air so she could hurl obscenities back at him, but instead they just stood there staring at each other. And then they _both_ started laughing.

“The look on your face just now,” he said as he doubled over at the waist. “Oh seven hells, that was almost worth falling in the river.”

“I hope it was worth _this_ ,” she said, crouching down to dig her fingers down through the snow for a fistful of mud, but her nails only scratched the surface of a mostly frozen ground. Not one to be outdone, Meera flung the scoop of mostly-snow in his face.

He dodged it but only just, and the turn of his head offered a broader target, and Ben was struck though it did not stop his laughing. He straightened, using a finger to dig to snow out of his ear, shaking his head and laughing at her.

“At least you never give up, Jo, I’ll give you that, eh?” he said, his eyes dancing as they grinned at each other, Ben swiping snow off his face and Meera shaking snow from her hand.

“Don’t you forget it, wildling,” she said, and his laughter died a bit, slowed to a chuckle and then a sigh and a smile.

He opened his mouth to speak, but then he stopped. Ben frowned and walked towards her. “Do you know, it’s the damnedest thing, but right now I feel like I can almost hear—”

“Music,” Meera whispered, and together they turned towards her wild little weirwood tree as if it were a bard standing there strumming. But then the song she could just barely, barely hear faded to silence, and she was left with nothing of interest to look at, until the bough of a sentinel in the tree line bent and sprung back up, casting snow to the ground.

“Ben, look,” she said, pointing to the trees nearest the gully, from where he had come walking soaking wet. Suddenly it struck her, how loud they’d been. She spun around to face him with a look of horror on her face that she could feel.

“Hold that tongue now or I’ll do it for you,” he breathed, resting a hand on her shoulder as he pushed and walked her backwards until her shoulder blades bumped the knobby trunk of the weirwood. She watched his face as he stared over her shoulder into the trees. “It’s not a wight, just a man. So get down and stay down, do you hear?”

Meera nodded and crouched beneath her little branch, watching as Benjen strode over to their tent, loudly whistling “The Burning of the Ships” as he crouched down to feign tending the fire. His sword and her spear were between him and the tent on the other side of the fire. If she wanted one of them she’d have to frog leap over Ben, then the fire to get to them. She had her knife, but it was in their little tent. She swore silently. Somewhere in her head, a faint and vague and faraway voice swore too.

Honestly, she was a little disappointed in their tracker when he immediately burst from the tree line at the first sign of Ben’s would-be distraction. Had he been paying any attention, he would have noticed the sudden silence where once there were two people talking. _Unless he underestimates the situation because one voice was a woman’s._ No matter; she hung back under the sparse cover of the balding weirwood, groping around in the snow for her bow.

“That’s a nice sword,” the intruder said in a slow amble of an accent, far friendlier than the look on his face as he walked to their little camp. Maybe he was drunk. His right side was to Meera, but he did not see her, at least not yet.

“Not as nice as the body I stole it from,” Ben said, still in his crouch. “That was far better, and it lasted a good week before it started to rot in my gut.”

“You don’t scare me, old man,” said the other man, coming to stand just at Ben’s side.

For a moment, Meera was taken aback. _Old?_  Old was her father, or the maester at Winterfell before he died. Old was not Ben. She’d watched him take down a boar, and clearly the man could handle standing around in the cold wearing soaking wet breeches and fur without batting an eyelash. _Old,_ she scoffed to herself, but then she saw the stranger reach down to a strap on his thigh, and then she saw the large hilt of a knife.

In that moment her hand closed on her unfinished arrow, and without a second thought she grabbed it, stood up and rushed forward, snapping the arrow in two.

“Ben, look out!” she shouted, sprinting the last few feet.

He immediately launched to his feet and leaped back, but not before the wildling man shoved the hilt of his blade hard into Ben’s side. She barely had time to register to look of shock and pain on his face as she rushed forward. Just before the wildling from the trees turned to face her, this source of noise and interruption, she launched herself up onto his back.

“You fucking cunt, get off,” he snarled, reaching back to grab a fistful of her hair. It hurt. She ignored it.

Meera did not reply, at least not with words. It only took two seconds to drive the arrowhead into the man’s throat, and another three to jab the broken end into his gaping mouth, her half done fletching protruding grotesquely. He dropped to his knees beneath the weight of her jump and her attack, and Meera had to stagger forward and sharply to the side into Ben to avoid walking directly into the little fire. He caught her easily, held her to him with an arm over her shoulders as they both stood and watched the life blood spill out of their would-be attacker, staining the snow. The little clearing was full of the sounds of his gurgling. Meera’s ears were full of the sound of her own heavy breathing, the rush of her pulse and Ben’s panting from behind her and above her.

“Well,” he said after a moment, his breath gathered and for the most part under control. “I gather you _really_ want to get home.”

She turned around and faced him with a frown. He dropped the arm from her shoulder and lifted his hand to rub his thumb across her forehead. It came away red with blood. Ben looked almost amused.

“Yes,” she said, but they stood in the presence of life slipping to death, and it was the moment for honesty, it was the blood soaked ground where truth bloomed. “Yes, but I also _really_ don’t want you to die.”

They stared at one another for several silent moments before he finally nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Let’s go get more firewood. We’re going to have to burn him, after we strip him of his things. Looks like you’ve earned yourself a new knife.”

“And at least you’ll have dry clothes now,” she said.

Giddy from a close call, Ben laughed so hard he eventually had to wipe tears away from his eyes.

That night was no colder than the former, but Meera found herself huddled closer to him, and instead of letting her snug herself up to his back as he had the entire trip south, that night Ben faced her. They did not embrace but her nose was burrowed into his chest, and his chin was tucked down against the top of her head, their arms folded across their respective chests. She slept for a while but woke frequently to red dreams that led from the splatter of wildling blood to the face of her brother. Finally, he spoke, a whisper that moved the hair on her head.

“You saved my life today. I don’t know how to thank you.”

She inhaled, smelled the earth and the heat and the snow of him, the humidity of their closeness here under a low-pitched stretch of elk hide. _I want to keep the smell of you near,_ she thought all of a sudden, wondering where it came from. In the dark, Meera smiled, feeling foolish. She didn’t care.

“It’s still a long way to the Wall. I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/137504649878/the-break-and-the-mend-chapter-7-are-you-all)

Meera breathes him in just as the tears on her face soak through his shirt, and there’s no such thing as dignity anymore, no such thing as pride of honor or of House or of name, there is simply the shattered pieces of her heart, and they scatter around her feet like shards of glass. To realize something like _love_ exists, to finally pick it up and inspect it and see it for what it is, only to be told _no,_ is sheer agony.

“You can’t say that and just _leave_ me _,_ ” she sobs.

She tried to hold smoke in her hands once, when she was a little girl and Jojen was even littler, telling her with his brooding eyes that he could see things through his dreams. She said she had power too as they sat before their father’s hearth, and she would try to cup the peaty smoke in her hands, watched it linger and with sad eyes watched it leave. _Practice_ , it seems to her now, _for a moment like this._

“You asked me, Meera,” he says, hush-soft against the crown of her head. “You asked me, so I told you.”

Was he always so honest? _Probably._

“Kiss me then,” she whispers, feeling the muscle and the bone of him as her hands run down his back to slip under and up his tunic. His skin is smooth, cool to the initial touch, but here her hands warm instantly from the heat that is trapped between his flesh and his tunic. “Kiss me if you love me.”

“I can’t,” he says against her hair. “Do you want me dead?”

“I want you mine,” she says, pushing her hands up his back and over his dressing. His body jerks and she freezes, immediately lifts her hands off of him.

“No, go on. Touch me where I’m broken and call it yours,” he says, and despite his resolve he takes his hands from their loose grasp on the small of her back, slides them down to the underswell of her rear. It’s nowhere near the furthest she’s been with a man but by gods, does it make her whimper.

“Kiss me,” she says, unbothered now by the whine that makes her voice sing like an insect’s. Her fingers run down both of his sides, and she feels his flesh shudder like a horse’s when she touches his injured rib. But he does not grimace, only hums in the back of his throat. Such coax and goad and cajole, his reaction to her. And such a contrast to his word and to his resolve. “There is no Lord Commander here, Benjen, just you and me. You’re telling me you were _never_ with a woman? Even after taking your oath?”

His breath on her, the hard thick of him pressed against her belly. She’s gasping now, weak and thirsty from the blaze of the fire and from the way he keeps his hands on her, from the way he stands like stone before her.

“I was, a few times, yes,” he says, lifting his head from hers, pressing his chin against her temple so she rests her cheek on her own shoulder. “A long time ago.”

Benjen moves, nudges his nose against her cheek and her jaw. He does not kiss her, but he _breathes_ her, up and down, past her ear and into her hair, his hands sliding up her spine, fingers a dig into her flesh, and she is moaning now, standing on her tiptoes to reach _more._

She can smell the spice of her warmed wine sitting on its little table, her senses are so spread out, and she wonders if he has his hands in her somehow, smearing her like dye across the muslin of him. Because she can also smell the _man_ of him now that it’s not covered in dirt and snow and blood. She can smell Benjen, she can feel him and she _wants_ him, even more than she wanted Ben.

“Then why not now?”

“Because you’re not a whore. That’s all I’ve had and all I ever will. You’re not a means to an end, you’re- you’re you,” he says against her throat, and there, _there,_ the flick of his tongue against her skin.

“I’m Honor, remember? I’m Duty,” she whispers. “Let me be those things, _please,_ Benjen,” she says.

“You’re worship,” he sighs. “I cannot have you because I cannot keep you. And I would keep you, if I could.”

“So take me, then,” she says, cradling the back of his head to keep him close. “Take me like wildling men do and take me to the Wall.”

He huffs. “You don’t belong there.”

“I belong with you, Benjen. I can feel in my very _bones_ that I belong with you, so take me. Sam took Gilly,” she says, hearing the stubborn child in her tone.

“And fend off all of my brothers? They _would_ turn to crows, truly, just for the chance to peck at you.” He speaks to her throat, inhales again with another lick. “For the chance to taste you,” he says, finally pressing a kiss just above where he dabbed her with his tongue.

She is so windswept from him that her knees buckle, so breathless all she can do is whimper, and he immediately drops his hands, wraps an arm around her waist to hold her steady against him. Meera arches her spine and lets her head sag back so she can look up at him.

“Are you all right?”

“No,” she whispers. “I am wretched.”

“We have that in common,” he says, closing his eyes and nodding when she lifts her hands to hold his face between them. “All right,” he says, pushing a hand into her hair, sliding his arm up her back to her shoulder blades as he pulls her close-close-closer, and he inclines his head to meet her halfway. Her heart races, and she is so dizzy the room spins because Benjen is saying “Fine, Meera, let’s see if I can taste you and walk away.”

Her eyes are closed by the time the door to her bedchamber bangs open, and they spring apart from each other at arm’s length, Benjen’s hand grasping her wrist, because he clearly anticipated her stagger and almost-drop to the floor. Together they stare at Rickon, who stands in the open doorway with the swagger and pomp of a sea captain, who stands there with his eyes glittering in the firelight like his wolf’s. He assesses the situation quickly, and with rakish impudence, he grins.

“My little doe was right, it seems,” he says, that rough Skagosi accent putting a steel grate to his voice. He rolls his flung back shoulders forward as he slinks into the room like a barnyard cat.

“What in the seven hells are you doing in her room?” Benjen says sharply, straightening his spine and taking a step forward, as if it is not his young nephew to whom he speaks, as if he were not himself just caught in a moment of near indecency.

“Benjen, stop,” she murmurs, putting her free hand on the one he has wrapped around her wrist. She turns to their surprise visitor. “Rickon, what is this about?”

“He never told you,” Rickon says, walking further into the room. He glances at the little table under her chamber window, at the plates of half eaten food Gilly had provided earlier. He hums and plucks a strip of roast chicken off the plate and takes a bite out of it. “Jon, that is. Jon never told you, and Shireen thought you should know.”

“Know _what_ , Rickon?” Benjen says. “You speak awfully cryptically for someone who just barged into a lady’s room.”

“So says the man tucked in her embrace,” Rickon says with a nod to their clasped hands, and reluctantly they part the touch, fingers sliding against one another until they stand side by side like naughty children. “I went first to your chamber, but when you were not there I took a wild stab in the dark and came to find you here. I might not read and write, but I’m not such a dullard, eh?” he says, tapping his temple before picking at the plate of chicken again.

“Rickon please,” Meera says.

“Uncle Benjen, there is no more Night’s Watch,” he says, gesturing with a sweep of his arm towards what Meera can assume is a northerly direction. “There has not been for nearly two years, ever since Daenerys came with her dragons and obliterated the Others. The Wall is simply that, now. A wall of ice, with abandoned castles dotting their way across it. You have no vow to uphold, anymore,” he says, grinning suddenly as he gestures between them with another hunk of meat flopping between his fingers. “Although clearly there are other vows you might consider before you have your way with each other.”

If it weren’t for the words he speaks, the one thing she’d consider now is slapping Rickon across the face, he is behaving so boorishly, but instead she simply stands there, dumbstruck. Her mouth drops open as she stares at him, watching him chew his food like a cow with cud, grinning like a fool as he regards his handiwork.

“You’re drunk,” Benjen says.

“If only,” Rickon says, “considering this chicken’s gone dry. Meera, do you mind?” he says before taking a drink straight from the half full flagon of wine on the table.

“Then you’re lying, or you think yourself a jester,” Benjen says. The tone of his voice is lethal, and even Rickon seems to pick up on it, for he sighs and sets down the wine, swallows his mouthful of food and shakes his head.

“No, uncle. I’m telling you the truth. Jon thought it wise to keep it from you, to unload the ugly truths one by one, but my wife thought ill of that choice. She told me tonight after meeting with him, and I agreed with her, so here I am. Go on and ask the king yourself, if you do not believe me,” he says.

Without another word, Benjen storms from the room, leaving her in his wake as she and Rickon stare in mute surprise at one another.

 

“I’m sorry, Meera, I didn’t think he would react that way. I thought he’d be happy. Judging from what I just walked into, I thought he would be _ecstatic,_ actually,” Rickon says as he follows Meera down the hall towards the spiral stairs that lead up to his good-brother’s chambers. “I didn’t think—”

“No, Rickon, you didn’t think at all,” she snaps, her hair a brown ringlet whip as she spins on her heel to glare at him. “You wanted a jape and a spectacle, and you got one. Not to mention you mortified _me,_ ” she says with a huff before turning to take the stairs by twos, the hem her too-large robe thrown over her forearm.

“That was not my intention,” he mutters, because perhaps she has the right of it, a bit. He didn’t expect to find them so entwined when he barged in, but he did think there would be some grand revelation, a clap of thanks on his back before they declared their love for one another. Rickon scowls to himself on the dark staircase.

If he wanted a spectacle in Meera’s room, though, he should have waited for it, because in Jon and Sansa’s chambers, he’s found one. Through the archway that divides the back bedroom from the sitting room, he can see Sansa holding little Eddard in the far corner of the bedroom, bouncing him in her arms to keep him from crying. In the main room next to his large table, Jon and Satin are standing together, each jockeying for the position in front to protect the other from the advancement of Benjen. The way they bump shoulders with each other in silent argument would make Rickon laugh if he hadn’t so horrifically fucked this entire thing up. Rickon just manages to stop Meera from rushing to his uncle by grabbing her around the arm, and he pulls her back to the doorway where he stands and watches.

“Tell me now, boy,” Benjen says, his deep voice a tremor from his temper, from his shock, from his fear, maybe. “Is what Rickon said the truth? Is there no more Night’s Watch? Are my brothers- do I have no brothers, now?”

“Uncle, please, calm down,” Jon says, hands up like he’s trying to settle a spooked horse. With a final nudge of his elbow he pushes Satin away, and his steward walks to the bedchamber, glancing over his shoulder every two paces.

“I won’t calm down! Today you tell me I have no family of my own blood anymore, and yet you fail to tell me the brothers with whom I swore my oath are no more. What game is this you’re playing?” he says, glancing over to Rickon with an angry gesture. “What game is this of his and yours?”

“Benjen,” Rickon says, taking a slow, careful step in, half wondering if he should use his uncle’s beloved Meera as a shield. He begins to speak in Skagosi but catches himself, clears his throat to iron out his words. “This is no game, this is the truth. Did you not wonder why there were no wights on your journey south? No Others, no roaming dead? Did you not wonder why there were no more pyres, why bodies could be buried once more? We speak true, and perhaps we brought it to you, perhaps _I_ brought it to you in a poor manner, but it _is_ true. There is no more need for the Watch because there are no more Others _to_ watch. The dead do not rise anymore,” Rickon says.

Benjen was a slow diffusion of anger as he spoke, and now he stands there, thin and exhausted as the fury in his eyes is bit by bit replaced with what Rickon can only call anguish. It has been a long, long time since he felt it but he too knows what loss feels like. _Shireen is right,_ he thinks with a pinprick of shame over his heart, as he recalls her attempts to stop him from leaving their chamber to find his uncle. _I am a bloody fool._

“I’ve served over half my life in the Night’s Watch,” Benjen says slowly, bowing his head as he runs a hand over his eyes and down his mouth and beard, and he shakes his head as he rubs his chin. “I dedicated half my life to being the watcher on the Wall, to serving with my brothers, and now it’s over. My calling is- I have no calling anymore. I wake up from a deep sleep to find that I have nothing now, that I _am_ nothing. You tell me the dead no longer rise, Rickon, but I feel a dead man myself, risen from the grave to find that nothing good remains of the world I knew.”

“Benjen,” Meera murmurs through her fingers, her hand over her mouth in near perfect mirror of Rickon’s uncle. She has tears in her eyes, trapped on the lower fans of her lashes. Rickon is mortified.

“No, Meera, call me Ben like you used to. Clearly there is no Benjen, not anymore,” he says, raking his hands up  and back through his hair as he shakes his head, over and over, and Rickon and Meera are forced to quickly step aside as Benjen strides past them and out the door.

“Well you’ve made a fine bloody mess of this,” Jon says angrily, walking up to Rickon and prodding his chest with a forefinger. “Why you thought you had to get involved is beyond me.”

“I? _You_ were the one who kept it from him in the first place.”

“It’s been a day, Rickon! One bloody _fucking_ day since they’ve been awake, since they’ve been more than fever- and herb-addled to do anything more than call out for each other,” Jon snaps, turning away from Rickon and Meera with his hands in his hair. He pauses when Meera chokes back a sob, and then his good-brother and king looks chagrined.

 _He looks like Benjen,_ Rickon thinks, and he wishes now that their uncle considered _them_ his family. But he started calling Osha ‘mother’ a few months after they fled to Skagos, so he supposes the feelings don’t always go with the title. Rickon sighs and tries to make it right, turns to Meera and takes her lightly by the shoulders until she lifts her gaze to him.

“Go on and find him. Check his chamber, the godswood, the kitchens; you’ll find him. He loves you and I wager he needs his woman now,” he says. Shireen is the only one who walks the realm that can coax him from his black moods, and he reckons his uncle is likely the same.

“He said he has nothing,” she says with another sorrowful sob, a hiccup of breath as she tries to gather her words like wool. “He said he has nothing, anymore, and that includes me.”

“He loves you, Meera. For my uncle to compromise on his word like he did with you in your room, that has to mean something. He’s in shock right now,” he says, thinking of the ship Davos sailed to Skagos, how surprised he was to walk naked down the beach and see Stannis’s banner and Hand, to first see his future wife. The shock of all shocks. “So go on, revive our uncle’s ghost. Bring him round and make him hot blooded again. You’ll have little problem with that, I have no doubt,” he says with a grin.

Meera cuffs him on the head, much lighter than the first time Shireen slapped him across the face, but then she hiccups again and lets loose a watery laugh.

“All right,” she says with a nod and a sniff against her sleeve as she gazes behind them out into the hall. “I’ll find him.”

“Now,” Jon says once Meera has hurried off, coming to stand beside him as they watch her go, “if only you’d saved your poetry for when you spoke to our uncle downstairs, you daft savage.”

“Aye, well,” he says, digging around in his pocket for the rind of cheese he swiped from Meera’s room. “Nobody’s perfect, Your Grace,” Rickon grins.

 

Without a second thought Meera steals down and out of the Keep, the chill a bite she has grown used to as she runs across the yard towards the godswood. That’s where he went after Jon broke the news to him about his family, and it’s where she hopes he’s gone now, now that he knows about the Night’s Watch. Rickon told her she’d find him and she hopes he’s right, because he called her his uncle’s woman and she so desperately hopes that it’s true; the first test, it seems to her, is to find her man.

He’s a tall slash of shadow standing before the heart tree in the glow of a fat, pale moon, the cloud cover having finally parted to give them this clear, spectacular night. It’s a striking sight, so much so that her sprint slows to a walk and finally a stop, some ten paces behind him as he looks up at the white boughs with their red leaves. His shoulders never lost their breadth on their journey, though he lost some muscle, and he cuts a formidable figure in the black of his cloak with his dark head of hair. But the crunch of her approaching footsteps must have alerted him to her presence, because he glances back even though she stands still.

“I hoped it was you,” he says, turning to face her in full.

Meera smiles.

“I need to apologize to you for my behavior,” he says, walking away from the ink black pool below the weirwood. She waits for him, tilting her head back ever so as he comes closer, until they are nearly toe to toe. “What horrible behavior, what horrible things for a man to say in front of the woman he loves,” Benjen says, cupping her face with a bare hand.

“You were taken aback, uprooted, floored. I understand. But please know that you’re not alone, Benjen. I will always be with you, if you allow it.”

“And I you,” he says.

“Are you not happy, though, in the end? Your life is your own now.” A sudden gale of wind gusts through the wood, one she would have called bitter, once. Now it’s magic, with the way it blows snow from the treetops and sends it falling flake by flake by flake all around them.

“My life is no more my own than when I was a brother of the Night’s Watch, Meera,” he says with an inhale. “It’s yours now, as good as any vow.”

“As mine is yours, Benjen. Or should I say Ben,” she teases lightly.

“You can call me anything you want, so long as you call me yours,” he says with a smile she can barely discern, his bowed head is backlit by such a powerful moon.

“My sweet Benjen,” she whispers with a giddy, breathless sort of laugh. He chuckles, strokes his thumb across her cheek, making her shiver, and that makes him frown.

“You’re cold,” he says without question, and he removes his hand from her to unclasp his cloak. “There, now,” he murmurs, swinging the cloak in an arc as he removes it from his shoulders and settles it on hers. “Better?”

“Almost,” she says, clasping the cloak with one hand while she reaches up for the nape of his neck with the other.

He is still smiling when she pulls him gently down to her level, his body bending and bowing over hers as he takes her in his arms, and she can feel the curve of it when she presses her mouth to his. Meera slides her hand from his neck to the beard on his jaw, opens her mouth when he prompts her, and finally they have the taste of one another, of long-sipped wine and heat, the slide of his tongue and the moan that hangs in the back of her throat.

All tentative stroke and hesitant linger disappear like the snapping of thread, and with a sudden inhale he stoops and wraps his arms tight around her waist, lifting her up in his arms, and though she can hear him grunt in pain she doesn’t stop him, this time. He hoists her high above him so that it is as if she is the taller, the light of the moon painting him pale as the scatter of snow beneath his feet, and he sighs when she sucks his lower lip in her mouth. Meera wraps her arms around his neck and her legs around his hips, not bothered in the slightest with how the action makes her nightgown ride up to her hips.  One of her slippers falls off her foot, and when she squeezes her thighs together and locks her ankles at the base of his spine, the other falls off too, and she feels wildling free now, kissing her man in a moonlit wood. Meera cards her fingers through his hair, tugs his head back to break the kiss.

“Take me to bed,” she says, and he _Hmmms_ as he lowers his head to kiss the side of her neck, all lick and nip and kiss, lick and nip and kiss, over and over until she rocks her hips forward.

“I would rather wed you before I bed you,” he says to the hollow of her throat, his beard a back-arching tickle on her skin.

“You cloaked and kissed me before a heart tree, Ben,” she whispers, holding him to her with a hand at the back of his head. “You swore your life to me. I think it’s been done.”

Benjen laughs, gives her a firm squeeze on the backs of her thighs where he holds her up. “Aren’t you a clever little woman,” he says, kissing her throat and her mouth before he sighs and smiles. “I carried you this way to that hot spring once, to try and stir the life back into you,” he says, and she can feel the rumble of his words through his chest as she clings to him, arms round his neck, chin on his shoulder. “And now I get to carry you to my bed to do the same thing.”

“Revive my ghost, Ben,” she whispers. “Make me live again.”

“As my lady wife commands.”

He is slow torture love, when they’re finally ensconced in his bed, is the heavy mouthed drag of kisses up her thighs and to the juncture between them, more of those sampling licks and bites before each kiss to her stomach. But he is sheer marvel and adoration by the time he stretches out on his side, cupping one breast with his hand while he sucks and loves the other with his mouth.

“I saw these lovely little things this morning, you know,” he murmurs, the scratch of scruff and flick of tongue making her arch her back and thrust her head back into his pillows. “Always so tucked away and hidden until then. Until _now,_ ” he says, using the suck of his mouth to punctuate his sentences. “Tell me, Meera, have you been with a man?”

She hesitates, blinks. “What a horrible time for such a question,” she says with a groan, and he grins, getting to his knees, the bruise on his un-bandaged rib black in the low glow from his banked fire. “Yes, a long time ago, I was with a man,” she says as he sits beside her with his back to the pillows and wooden headboard. She sits up, flips the hair out of her eyes and regards him suspiciously.

“Good,” he says, reaching over and grabbing her by the hips.

“Good? Not the reaction a woman expects from her husband in their marriage bed,” she says with a squeal as he drags her up and onto his lap. Quickly she bends her knees coming to settle on his lap, the hard upward thrust of him pressing against her belly. It makes her breathless, makes her hungry, makes her close her eyes. “Why do you even ask such a thing?”

“Because I don’t want to hurt you. I want this to feel good, Meera,” he says, lifting her up by her rear, pushing her closer to him so that she sits astride him, so that she sits astride _him._

“Oh,” she says, glancing down to where he guides himself, and for a moment she is extremely nervous; she has never been on top of a man like this. But then– “ _Oh,_ ” she says, her chest rising and pushing forward as her spine arches when Benjen slides inside her, and she moves her knees further away from him until she sinks down completely.

“Good? Yes?” he murmurs, sitting up with a grunt as he pushes her down, down, down with one hand on her hip, pushes himself up into her with the smallest of movements, and now she feels she is made of custard, stained purple and red with sweet berries.

“Yes, Ben,” she says, head dropping back a moment before she rights it to gaze at him. His blue eyes are on her, mouth parted as he begins to move and breathe in rhythm, and she nods her head helplessly as her hips rock forward, answering some question she herself didn’t fully understand until this moment. “Veryverygood,” she breathes.

“I’ve loved you, Meera,” he whispers against her collarbone, each shallow thrust filling her so deliciously, deep as he already is inside her, each word dropped to her skin making her so happy she feels like she will burst. “Oh, how I’ve loved you.”

“I love you too,” she says, over and over again as she begins to rock, her knees pressed deep into the featherbed. “I love you now and I loved you then,” she says, ending on a sharp cry as he pushes harder now, and deep inside her something hits a high, strumming note. “I think I loved you always.”

“I know now,” he says, sucking in a breath, and he shudders and pushes and pulls as she comes around him, his forehead resting between her breasts as if he is deep in prayer. “I finally, truly know.”

 


	8. The Fever.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [picset wooo](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/137571972188/another-shitty-picset-but-i-dont-care-because-i)

The sun had just risen by the time Benjen squirmed out of their snug little tent, and though he had to grunt and wriggle and pulled half the furs and horse blankets with him, Jo did not stir. He thought nothing of it until he returned sometime later, having taken his morning piss and gathered enough wood to rekindle their fire, and found that she was still sleeping. It was mildly irritating to him; his side had been giving him no small amount of pain and trouble since that bastard stabbed him with the wrong end of a knife. Would that _he_ could sleep in like some lord of luxury.

“Jo, wake up. The Black Gate is less than half a day’s ride from here, and if we hurry we might be able to find some hayloft or shack on the other side of the Wall to sleep in by nightfall,” he said, squatting down with a wince by the ring of black rocks and the small pile of mostly dead embers.

By the time he had the fire going and she was still abed, Benjen began to worry. Finally after breaking his fast on some of last night’s rabbit and mushrooms, he crawled over to the tent and stuck his head inside.

“Jo, come now, what reason do you have for sleeping so late?”

The past week they’ve slept better and better, or at least he has, and have woken more rested each morning than before they even left for south of the Wall. He is mystified as to why she suddenly has need for more sleep. Their close proximity to one another had meant no more numb noses or fingers, had meant longer stretches of undisturbed sleep, though sometimes he found he must turn his back to her in the night, when his body betrayed his arousal with that most obvious of tells.

“Mm,” she murmured. “There’s no need. He’ll see us from here, if there’s a heart tree,” she said, face down in the blankets.

Benjen chuckled at her drowsy nonsense. “Who will see us? Who in bloody hells do you mean?”

“The boy in the weirwood. He will have a thousand eyes too, soon,” she said.

He frowned, got to his knees and elbows, and snake-bellied into the tent until he was head to head with her. Benjen readjusted his position and used a hand to gently roll her onto her back. Jo’s face was flushed and creased from the fold of blanket she used as a pillow, but her eyes were still closed. He gave her a small shake, and finally she opened her eyes. It was an unfocused green gaze that took several slow, almost drunken blinks before she aimed it at him and smiled.

“There you are, Ben. I thought you’d left me,” she said sleepily before she closed her eyes once more and flinched. “I ache everywhere,” she whispered, her face still contorted in a grimace as she whimpered and rolled back to her side.

Still frowning, Ben took his hand from her shoulder and gently rested his palm on her forehead. He sucked an inhale through his teeth.

“You’re burning up, Jo,” he murmured, brushing a tumble of her hair away from her eyes and temples, and he let his hand linger in a cup against her cheek a moment as he gazed at her. No response, and it worried him enormously. “Wait here, now, let me see what I can do.”

It wasn’t so snow-covered this close to the Wall, and the added protection of the trees above them made his hunt for herbs that much easier. What he found wasn’t much but it was worth the effort to him to see her feel better, even if it were just by a hair. He tromped back through the woods towards their camp, hoping against hope that she would be waiting by the fire for him, but he was disappointed upon his return.

Benjen squatted and sat on his haunches by the fire as he melted snow in their little iron pot, wadding up the feverfew and skullcap into a tiny ball. When the snowmelt began to steam and bubble, he put the wad in his mouth, chewed it a few times before taking it out of his mouth and dropping it into the pot. When it had steeped several minutes, he carefully took the pot off the fire and brought it to her.

“Come on, now, time to wake up,” he said gently, easing his way as carefully as possible with the hot little pot. “I need you out there in case someone else tries to attack me,” he said, and when she smiled weakly by way of reply, he smiled back even though her eyes were closed.

“You don’t need a little thing like me, do you, Ben?” she said, and when she lifted her head he quickly propped his hand beneath it to hold her up.

“On the contrary. I need you very much. Here, drink this, little flying squirrel,” he said, grinning when she finally opened her eyes to glare blearily at him. The sight of her launching through the air to slay his would be killer would never fade from his memory. 

“That’s what every woman wants to hear from a man,” she said, inspecting the contents of the pot when he held it out for her. “’You look a squirrel, my lady,’” she said with a cough.

“Just drink the damn tisane, Jo,” he said with a smile, and she raised her eyebrows, woozily shrugged a shoulder, and put her mouth to the lip of the pot.

He had to help her, tipping the thing slowly so that she could get some herbs in her, but not so much that it spilled all down her chin. She had a sheen of sweat on her brow, but in truth he was almost overwarm here too. Between their combined body heat and the rising steam from her tea, it was almost balmy.

“You _need_ me, you say, but do you want me here? Haven’t I been trouble to you, dragging you so far from your home?” she said a few moments later, having drunk half the tea and lain her head back down. His hand was pinned beneath her, an extra pillow on top of her folded blanket, and so for the time being he was stuck here with her. _No loss in that, though,_ he thought as he gazed at her.

“You’ve been no trouble, you’ve been a boon. I think maybe the gods sent you to me,” he said, flirting dangerously with revealing his true self, but she was drifting off to sleep even as he spoke, and so Benjen opted not to worry about it.

“They sent me to love you, maybe,” she said, frowning in her doze, whimpering once more before she drifted off to sleep.

For the rest of the day she slept and Benjen paced their camp, rubbing the back of his neck through his hair, wondering what in seven hells she had meant, wondering why in seven hells it made his heart race so fast when she said it.

Three days later she was no better, and to make matters worse he was starting to feel ill himself. Every joint in his body ached along with his hurt ribs, and stoking the fire with his stick was an agony of movement, never mind finding the kindling to begin with. She wriggled up to him early one morning while they both lingered in the haze of their shared illness, rolling onto her side close to him, and he felt the arrival of her with the sudden weight of her head on his chest.

“Don’t leave me,” she whispered faintly. Her voice was a shadow of its former self, but still it roused him from his dreamless, seasick sort of sleep.

“Hmm? I’m not going anywhere,” he whispered back, frowning with his eyes closed. He shifted, grunted with the effort of pulling his arm free so he could hold her with it.

“Everyone I love dies. I couldn’t bear it, Ben. I don’t want to be alone. Don’t let the Children find me. Please don’t leave me,” she said with a choke, a cough, a sputter and a sob, and he realized in his vague state that she was crying. Benjen opened his eyes.

“I’m not going to die and I’m not going to leave you,” he said, running his fingers through her hair. _She is delirious,_ he thought, _speaking of Children and heart trees, sacrifice and- and love._ He had dreamed he was a boy again last night and thought he was back at Winterfell when he woke _. She is just trapped in a fever state like I was,_ he thought _._

“I don’t want to love a dead man,” she moaned, hiccupping against his chest, and the desperation of so heartbreaking a plea put a little grit in his bloodstream.

“You’re not going to,” he said, easing her onto her back so he could sit up. His head throbbed and his body protested with a thousand searing aches that swept through him, but still, he sat up. “Come on, Jo. We’re not going to waste away here. I’m going to get you home. I gave you my word, and it’s my most valuable currency.”

“I told you my father would give you coin.”

“I’d rather _you_ pay me by getting better.”

It took him all morning, until the sun was a high bright point of vagueness above the low crowd of clouds, but eventually he had the camp broken down and their horses packed, and his final task was to help the shivering crannogwoman up on her feet and to her horse. He had just barely gotten her situated on her mount when she slumped forward and started to slide off. Benjen caught her just in time before she cracked her head open on the rocky turf below.

“Well,” he said when she started to cry, shallow gusts of misery that were too weak to produce tears anymore. “That just won’t do now, will it,” he said with a heaving sigh.

It took a few laborious moments of hard thought, but eventually he came up with a plan. With the cluck of his tongue he led her horse to a short boulder as he held her up in his arms. “Wrap your legs around me and hold on now. I’ll have to let you go to get up,” he said, and when she did as he requested he stood up on the rock and hauled them both up onto her horse. He walked them around to the other side of his own horse, snagged up the reins and tied them to hers.

“All right, now. Let’s get you someplace warm,” he murmured, guiding their horses out of the wood and towards the great towering Wall to the south of them. “Come on, Jo, I’ve got you,” he said. _And gods be damned, woman, but you’ve got me too,_ he thought, trying and failing to push her feverish words from his mind.

Because it did not do, for a man of the Night’s Watch to be loved by a woman. It was futile, even worse for that man to love her back. _She does not love me,_ he told himself as he brought the horse up to a canter. _She does not love me, not truly,_ he told himself as he held her tight. But that did not mean he didn’t use the thought to help keep him going, just a little bit.

Just a little bit wouldn’t hurt.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Picseeeet](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/137764261923/the-break-and-the-men-chapter-9-i-think-spring)

“Are you determined to make sons now that you're able, husband?” Meera sighs out to the ceiling, her fingers a wonderful, agonizing tug as they close in his hair. It has been a week of this, a long lazy week of sleeping and sighing, and they have barely left his rooms to eat, let alone socialize. She is all he needs for the present, if only she would let him focus.

“Daughters are fine too,” he murmurs distractedly, though his thoughts are far from making children and are more in line with simply making her come.

He is over a decade out of practice and he will be damned if he does not learn the ropes, here. If she is a lovely ship, he will sail her. If she is a river, he will navigate her. If she is the very realm itself, he will map her.

“Daughters with dark hair and blue eyes,” she sighs, lifting her legs to lock them around the low of his back. Benjen lifts his head from her breast.

“Would you bloody well stop talking? You are disturbing a pupil from his studies,” he says, propping himself up on his elbows as he pushes a slow thrust into her, watching the way it makes her expression change, her mouth go slack and her eyes roll back. He grins and moves his hips again.

“I am your maester, though. Your – oh _gods_ , Ben – I am your, your maestra,” she corrects, breath hitching as he moves faster, as he watches her, watches her, watches her.

"Aye, and a good one," he murmurs. I _know you better now than ever I did before,_ he thinks, dropping his head back to her breasts when he contents himself that she is enjoying this.

Several minutes later, there is overwhelming evidence that she is.

 

“I think spring will be here soon,” she says, chest deep in the hot springs as Benjen stands behind her, combing her wet hair with his fingers. “The sun is out in full today,” she says, lifting an arm to point up at the mostly-blue sky above. Steam rises from her pink skin.

“Spring came the day I met you,” he says, voice lofty and affected, and Meera rolls her eyes as she turns in the water to snake her arms around his neck. He grins, lets his fingers drop from her hair as he finds her waist underwater.

“Marriage has turned you into a fool,” she says, making him laugh.

“Then why are we getting married _again_? Another cloaking, another vow, another kiss? Will I become an utter simpleton then?”

They are bathing together before the ceremony later in the afternoon, are taking their time at this early morning hour before the guests begin to stir. She brought a cake of soap with her but he refused to let her sully the water that way, and instead he sunk down completely, grabbing a handful of pea-sized gravel on the spring bed to gently slough her skin with it. She felt scrubbed brand new, and when he was finished she returned the favor. Now they lounge and they linger and they soak.

“Your niece and nephews wish it, Ben. I do not think they believed us when we told them we wed ourselves that night.”

“It _was_ a long day, wasn’t it?” he says, walking backwards with her in his arms, until he finds a shallower place he can sit, and he perches her on his thighs and looks up at her. “Mayhaps they thought we were still delirious.”

“It had to be a long day, though, didn’t it? In the end. To bring us fully together after so many months,” she says, kissing his forehead before dropping a kiss to his mouth. The sun filters through the trees and shines on the wet black of his hair, slicked back like seal’s fur down his neck to his shoulders. He is like a merman, here in the steam and the sparkle of early morning, and if he dragged her to the bottom of the pool and drowned her to keep her forever, she would go willingly.

“Night’s Watch oath or no, Meera, I would have followed you to the ends of the realm and back. We would have had our day sooner or later,” he says, and she smiles because already he forgets what he is like when he has devoted himself to something. Meera has dragons to thank that he is devoted in full to her now.

“If you say so,” she says.

“Speaking of journeys: Tell me, little wife,” he says, resting his head back against one of the porous rocks lining this little section of the spring, “because I never did fulfill my promise. Would you want to go to the Neck? Would you want me to bring you home still?”

Meera laughs.

“You can take me to the Neck to see Greywater Watch or to visit my father, but you _did_ fulfill your promise, Ben. You brought me home, just as you said you would.”

“What, here in the North, spearwife Jo?” he says with a smile, with a cup of his hand to her jaw. “Here at Winterfell, Lady Meera?”

“No, you ridiculous man,” she says happily, kissing him soundly. “Here with _you_.”

 

At the end of the evening, Benjen decides he prefers their first wedding to their second. There is nothing wrong with this more formal affair, with watching his wife tear up as her father removed her cloak of black and green so Benjen could drape her in grey and white. Nothing wrong at all with the endless dishes of food, with the nonstop dancing, with the music and the laughter and the occasional sound of broken glass and wolves howling. But braziers and firelight are nothing to winter moonlight on a pale face, winter moonlight so bright it lit up the green of her eyes as she gazed up at him in the black of his Night’s Watch cloak. There was simplicity and honesty in that nighttime godswood that pomp and ceremony cannot hold a candle to.

But there _is_ , he has to admit, something wonderful about sitting on the dais in his family home with his tipsy wife on his lap, laughing so hard at something Harwin said that she spills wine on his knee.

“You look a happy man, uncle,” his nephew the king half shouts from two chairs down at the center of the table, leaning over his wife’s growing belly to deliver the message.

“Then I look as I feel,” Benjen says, tugging on a long ringlet of his wife’s hair just as she gets up to dance a reel with her father.

“It is a strange thing, is it not? To go from the Wall to Winterfell,” Jon says. “Though I’m glad you have decided to fight through the strangeness and stay on as my advisor. In the end, Rickon made Shireen too wild, and not the other way round. I could not convince her, but I’m glad I convinced you.”

Benjen laughs. “I’ll fight strangeness all the day though to end up in such a wondrous position,” he says, watching his wife. _My wife,_ he thinks to himself. _That is passing strange, indeed,_ he thinks. Of all the vows he’s made, he’s only made two in front of a weirwood. _Well, technically three,_ he thinks with a faraway smile, gazing into his cup. He is fiercely proud of all of them.

“Walk with me, Benjen, would you?” Jon says in his ear a moment later, having materialized from nowhere, it seems, in the moments his thoughts started to wander.

“Aye, Your Grace,” he says dryly. Jon rolls his eyes.

The walk weaves them up and around and back to the inner wall of Winterfell, though tonight they do not face the south as they did for that horrible conversation all those weeks ago. No, tonight they face north. Tonight they face the Wall, and before Jon even opens his mouth, Benjen knows.

“Night gathers,” they say in unison, and the rest of the words roll out of him like shore-bound waves returning to the sea. Jon’s voice is a perfect bleed into his, and for the briefest of moments Benjen feels like he is back at Castle Black, on top of the Wall, reciting his oath in front of a weirwood, out ranging for a cause. For the briefest of moments he is a young man again, full of purpose and drive. And for the briefest of moments he feels that old loneliness, that deep ache that comes from staring out at a future of solitude. The wind howls and the clouds roll overhead, blotting out the moon, and the moment is gone. A bit to his sorrow but much, much more to his infinite relief.

“To you and your wife,” Benjen says after a long moment of wind-chilled silence, and he turns to Jon with his cup raised.

The king smiles.

“To you and yours, brother,” he says, and together they drink to vows made to women instead of walls, to their pasts and to their futures as the North looks on in silence.


	10. The Beginning and the End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> THE END IS HERE. It's barely over 400 words so I figured to hell with it, I'm posting them back to back. 
> 
>  
> 
> [Picset](http://jillypups.tumblr.com/post/137765522633/the-break-and-the-mend-chapter-10-gilly)

Gilly dunked the damp rag in the bowl of cool water steeped with peppermint leaves, gave it a swish and squeezed it out before placing it carefully on lady Meera’s forehead, leaving her fingers lightly pressed to the cloth. The vine-thin crannogwoman frowned in her sleep, and just as Gilly anticipated, tossed in her wine-deepened sleep. She gently righted lady Meera’s head, adjusted the cloth and took a step back, inspecting her work. Gilly sighed and shook her head. She’d tended to her sisters countless times, but perhaps by virtue of the strong stock from which they came, none of them had been so sick as these two. Two days now without a break in the fever for either of them, two days and she could barely get water down the poor girl’s throat, could hardly tend to the lord’s rib without him thrashing in his sleep and groaning in pain.

She turned when there was a light rap on the lady’s door.

“Gilly?” Sam said, poking his head in. He smiled tiredly when he saw her.

“No change for her, yet,” she said, and they walked towards each other, meeting at the foot of Meera’s bed.

“Neither for him,” he said with a heaving sigh, and he patted her hand affectionately when Gilly tucked it in the warm space between his arm and the thickness of his body. Sam bent his arm to accommodate her, and in that lovely moment she felt as regal as a queen herself.

“Ben,” Meera murmured, turning her head to the left and then the right. Gilly narrowed her eyes, willing the cloth to stay in place, and when it did she nodded. “Ben, please.”

“There’s no change with _that,_ either, Sam. All she does is call for him.”

“Lord Stark is much the same,” he murmured quietly, gesturing with his head towards the door. “So much so that even if you and I didn’t know her, we would soon enough, he asks for his Meera that often.”

“Do you think they’ll recover?” she asked once they were in the hall and the lady’s door was closed. It didn’t seem right, asking in front of her, even with her being so deep under with dreamwine and fever.

Sam shrugged, but he smiled as well. “If they’re this determined to find each other through sleep and wine and poppy, then I wager they’re strong enough to pull through,” he said.

Gilly had to content herself with his logic.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU SO MUCH to those of y'all who wandered in to enjoy one of my all time favorite ships. I appreciate the feedback and kind words, and I hope you liked it at least a fraction as much as I fucking LOVED writing it. XOXOXO


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